Seasons of War
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash, sequel to 'Ceremonies of Strife.' As the war against Nihil enters its final stages, Harry and Draco continue their training, and perhaps will even survive to be full Aurors. Maybe. COMPLETE.
1. Hard at Work

**Title: **Seasons of War

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairings: **Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione

**Rating: **R

**Warnings:** Violence, torture, sex, angst, profanity, ignores the DH epilogue.

**Summary: **The war against Nihil enters its final stages, Harry and Draco train as partners, and they may actually survive to become effective Aurors. Maybe.

**Author's Notes: **This is the final part of the Running to Paradise Trilogy, sequel to _Ceremonies of Strife_, and won't make much sense if you haven't read the first two stories. I don't yet know how long this one will be, but based on the others, I'm guessing 45 to 50 chapters.

**Seasons of War**

_Chapter One—Hard at Work_

"How much do you understand of the theory of necromancy, Trainee Potter?"

Harry tried to decide whether or not he was irritated by Battle Healer Portillo Lopez's cool tone, and then decided that it didn't really matter. She was the one in charge here, the one who was supposed to work with him to create a Parseltongue-based necromancy that he could teach to other people. And Harry knew almost nothing about how his own gift worked, let alone about this kind of magic in other people.

"Not much," he admitted, leaning forwards to stretch his hands above the fire between them. They had Warming Charms on, but still he swore he could feel the cold wind blowing on them from the open camp. There was less snow in the camp today, which didn't keep the chill from biting at them. They were in the middle of winter, after all. He and Portillo Lopez were seated on hard wooden chairs Harry thought had been devised specifically for their discomfort, and in a warded circle so that no one who came near them could hear what they were talking about. "Just that it's supposed to be a way of talking to the dead, but the necromancers usually end up commanding them."

"That will do as a beginning." Portillo Lopez looked absolutely comfortable, of course, and as if she didn't even need the headscarf that she usually wore draped above her hair. "Why do you suppose that so many necromancers become corrupt?"

Harry shook his head. "I don't know. The books didn't tell me."

Portillo Lopez smiled, which looked as though it was happening in spite of her better judgment. "Books cannot tell you everything you will need to know, especially since your magic is outside their common scope. Use your reason."

Harry bit his tongue on the desire to say that lots of people had told him his reason was deficient. He should work with Portillo Lopez as best he could. The Aurors knew, now, how much he and Draco had hidden from them and how often they'd taken off on their own. They were on thin ice.

Harry looked into the fire, and thought a bit before answering, "Because it's a Dark Art, and the Dark Arts tend to corrupt people with the thrill of forbidden power?"

"Are you asking me or telling me?" Harry had had other teachers, such as Snape, who would have asked that question, too, but he didn't think he'd ever had anybody who was so good at sounding neutral and being irritating at the same time.

"Telling you, I reckon." Harry looked at her and shrugged. "I just don't _know_. When I was using normal necromancy, my main concern was to make sure that I didn't get caught, and I used my own blood and body as the sacrifices it needed because I couldn't dream of sacrificing anyone else. Are you sure that you should be asking a necromancer about why he does what he does?" he couldn't help adding. "Or shouldn't you tell me, because you're the expert in necromancy?"

Portillo Lopez gave a little sigh and folded her hands in a new position. "You are the only necromancer we have ever seen, Trainee Potter, who has gone on so surprising a course."

"Well, I know that," said Harry, mystified. Everyone else said Portillo Lopez was a clear teacher. _Why don't I understand her, then? _"Since I use Parseltongue and not Latin and everything."

Portillo Lopez gave another tiny sigh. "You are unusual in other respects. For not trying to practice the art after you were caught except at the urging of others, and for not immediately using others' blood."

"I think you're probably wrong," Harry said, because he couldn't believe that he was really that much more moral than other people. "You told me you don't often catch up with necromancers until they get to the stage where they're raising armies of the living dead and slaughtering people, and then their memories are clouded. So probably there are lots of them who go a few steps in and then stop."

"The traditional theories say that it is difficult to do so, because of the call of the dead and, yes, the seductive power of any Dark Art." Portillo Lopez rearranged her hands again. Harry looked at them so he didn't have to look into her eyes, which he felt were judging him constantly. Scars crossed and crisscrossed the brown skin there and split her knuckles, and Harry found himself wondering if those came from her work as a Healer or her other job as part of an Order that assassinated necromancers when it found them. "I have a different theory." She paused.

Harry refrained from rolling his eyes, but it was hard. "What is it, Auror?"

"That necromancy is the kind of magic that complements Healing," said Portillo Lopez. "Many of those who begin their training as Healers find themselves obsessively drawn along, learning procedures they never meant to. Few of those at St. Mungo's are trained in only one kind of Healing, did you know that? I think only among the Mind-Healers are there many specialists, and that often happens because they must take years to learn what they know. They have no _time _to pick up multiple methods of wrapping wounds, or learning how to cure certain spells or poisons."

"But then all you have is two cases of similar obsession," Harry said. "That doesn't prove they're anything alike, or give me any data, since I don't know why Healers are so obsessive."

Portillo Lopez's smile might have had a little more strained patience this time. "The Healers are drawn on because of the need to serve life," she said. "That much is commonly accepted. When you feel the raw force of life itself flowing through your fingers, knitting skin and bone together or removing a botched potion from someone's system, then you wish to continue. And of course, most of the candidates for Healer positions genuinely wish to help others.

"With necromancy, one does not have the same options, of course, but one _does _have the same contact with raw forces. In this case, it is the coldness and the stillness of corpses, the lack of change that separates the dead from the living." Portillo Lopez cocked her head, eyes glinting. "Not all my fellow Order members agree with me. But there are some people who are more susceptible to that call, I believe, just as there are those who are almost doomed to become Healers."

"So what happened with me?" Harry asked. He had to admit this idea made more sense to him than some of the books he had read, although he didn't know what proof Portillo Lopez really had. "Why didn't I give in to death?"

"Two reasons." Portillo Lopez lifted two fingers. "Either one may be true, or perhaps both. I am not sure.

"The first." She folded down one finger. "You are simply too committed to life to give in as many others do. You could give up your life for someone else, I know that, but in the meantime, you live it impulsively. You have experienced more in your young years than other wizards, too, which may help. I would not be surprised," she added in a musing tone, "if the incidence of necromancers in the next generation drops. So many of them experienced the war, and that brings them into contact with death and makes it horribly, frighteningly real, not the abstraction it often is for those under fifty."

Harry nodded, not sure what else he could add to that, or say.

"The other possibility is the one I saw written on your skin when Holder performed her little spell." Portillo Lopez could never speak about Holder without a twitch in her jaw, but she did sound calmer this time, as compared to others. "_Return._ You died and then came back to life, didn't you?"

Harry scowled at her. "I don't know," he said. "I really don't. I thought I did, but no one comes back from the Killing Curse, do they? And don't say anything about this," he added, tapping his scar. "My mother's love was what protected me, not some miraculous ability to get resurrected."

Portillo Lopez shook her head. "Life and death are more mysterious than we often consider them," she said. "Necromancy proves that the absolute barriers are not so absolute. And that is what will help us develop weapons against Nihil."

"What will?" Harry demanded. "I think he knows that those barriers are flimsy. He goes back and forth between them like curtains all the time."

"But his essential nature does not change," said Portillo Lopez, with a slow smile. "And change is the condition of life, of the body, as it is not of the spirit. I believe it is the key to your art as well."

"Because snakes are living things?" Harry knew he was guessing in the dark, but he had no idea what Portillo Lopez was saying.

"In part," Portillo Lopez said. Harry contained his impatient sigh by biting his lips. It seemed that every answer he came up with was only partially right. "And snakes shed their skins, changing their bodies in a way that an entity like Nihil cannot understand any longer."

"He changes bodies." Harry's head was beginning to hurt.

"But not in the same way." Portillo Lopez tapped her fingers on her knee, her nails sounding as though they were grating on bone. "And then there is the non-material nature of the illusions that you worked with to create your first necromancy effect, as compared to the material nature of the bodies that Nihil prefers to occupy or place souls under his control within."

Harry resigned himself to a headache, and to a longer conversation before they managed to do anything worth the doing. He hoped that Draco was having more luck.

Then he remembered who Draco was working with and winced.

_I doubt that any luck I can wish him is enough for the situation._

* * *

"Things would go much more easily for you if you would cooperate with me, Trainee Malfoy."

Draco was grateful, in a way he had never been before, for those long hours of trying to please his father, either by doing perfectly the first time tasks Lucius had never explained to him before or remaining calm and still when he was a child who wanted to make noise. It was the only reason Alice Holder was alive rather than dead at his hand in a fit of abject frustration.

She stood in front of him in one of the smaller tents that filled the camp, her hands wrapped around her wand and her eyes never moving from his face. Draco knew why. The Head Auror's attack dog was still convinced that he and Harry had been up to no good, even when they'd explained everything—well, almost everything—and she was waiting for the moment when he gave up the "good" disguise and leaped for her throat.

_Keep this up and you'll see a demonstration sooner than you'd like, _Draco thought, but reminded himself that that was the way she wanted him to act and think. He would retain his independence and his tranquility. In the end, he knew, that would hurt her much worse than anything else he could do.

"I'm trying, Auror Holder," he said. "But perhaps you could explain your requests to me again? I didn't understand them the first time, which is _entirely _my fault, I'm sure."

Holder turned away, to the flap of the tent, and looked out of it as if she didn't trust the trainees and the Aurors working with them not to blow each other up without her presence. Draco took the moment to study her back for weaknesses. Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be any. Her balance was perfect, and he had already seen that she knew more and nastier spells than most Aurors.

"It is simple enough," Holder said, her speech as patterned as a tile floor. "I want to know what torture you think is necessary to break your partner."

Draco bowed his head. "And that is the point where my understanding fails, Auror," he said, imitating her tone, though not closely enough to count as mockery. He achieved his purpose, anyway, making her turn her head to look at him with narrowed eyes, suspicious but unsure. "Why would you need to know how to break Harry? I thought I was supposed to discuss, with you, torture techniques that would be useful on Nihil's underlings. He is the one who has the extreme fear of torture, after all."

"Your partner is a necromancer," Holder said. "The application from one to the other ought to make sense even to you."

"A necromancer of a different type than Nihil is," Draco said, lifting his head. "Or there would be no point in having him work with Battle Healer Portillo Lopez." He gave most people their full titles around Holder, for the same reason he'd done it around Professor Snape.

"I wish to know general techniques as well as specific ones," Holder said, and her wand spun once in her hands. "Tell me."

Draco spent a moment composing himself. Yes, the request enraged him, annoyed him, and made him want to jab his own wand into Holder's throat. But doing all that would mean giving in to the feelings she was trying to stir in him. He would be better off if he simply managed to lie to her.

_And win more of a victory, as well. _Power was more crucial in these circumstances that any others where Draco had ever wanted it.

"You must know," Draco said, lowering his voice so it would become portentous and widening his eyes to the limit he thought he could manage without Holder thinking him an actor, "that Harry survived a lot during the war. The worst Voldemort and his minions could do to him was as nothing to him." As a matter of fact, he knew that Harry had escaped torture at least in Malfoy Manor and during the final battle. Granger was the one who had suffered his aunt's tender mercies at the Manor. But what right did Holder have to that knowledge?

Holder nodded back to him. "I was, in fact, aware of that, Trainee Malfoy."

Draco glared, not thinking she would take it amiss, since she already knew that he resented working with her. "Well, it takes _unusual _torture to wring much of a response from him. For example, drawing a small amount of blood from his finger would work."

Holder's rising eyebrows were as eloquent a demand for an explanation as words would have been. Draco obliged. "Necromancers use blood in their rituals," he said. "Losing even a little bit of blood makes them panic. Harry's the same way."

"I knew there was no great difference between them," Holder said, a mere breath behind her words. "What else?"

"The _anticipation _of torture can do a lot on its own." This statement had more basis in reality than the notion of pricking a necromancer's finger, and Draco closed his eyes as he remembered the look in Aran's eyes—well, the eyes of the man who had once been Aran—as he leaned back against the wall in the room where he had died. "Threaten enough, and Nihil's people may at least spill secrets. They know that they don't have his ability to pass through death and come into a new body, unless he grants it to them, and he doesn't do that for everyone. The spell I used was a strangling one. Simple torture, but effective."

"I will remember that," said Holder. "And I will remember how good you are at this, Malfoy."

"Thank you, Auror," Draco said meekly. He waited until she left the tent before he turned and sought out parchment and ink. This was the tent he and Harry had been granted, as partners, and Draco had taken on the task of organizing it and—not that anyone but Harry knew this—regularly summoning a house-elf from the Manor to make sure fresh supplies were always in reach.

Draco wanted to work with the Aurors. He wanted to complete his training. He wanted to see Nihil defeated. But nowhere in that group of desires was the desire to be bullied and threatened and asked what kinds of torture might work on his partner.

Holder might genuinely believe that Harry was a threat. She might want to make sure that there was a way of stopping him if he ever behaved the way she manifestly expected a necromancer to behave. Draco didn't think she was evil in the same sense that Nihil was; her loyalty was to Head Auror Robards.

But he still hadn't agreed to this, and he wouldn't be her toy or her pawn in a power struggle against Harry. He wrote a letter explaining the situation in a few lines, and then whistled softly.

Flash, Harry's fire-dancer, lay asleep in a corner of the tent, but he opened one eye and lifted his head when he saw Draco looking at him. Beside him, Politesse, the small scorpion-tailed dog that Harry had acquired for Draco, lifted his head in turn, and then put it down again with a small whine when he realized that Draco wasn't trying to summon him.

"Sorry, you're too distinctive, and you don't have wings," Draco told him. "Flash can go fast enough that most people won't realize he's not an owl." He extended the letter. "Will you take this to the large field on the outside of camp for me, and give it to the woman who's leading them?"

Flash took his time sitting up and shaking out his wings, as if to show that he owed only provisional loyalty to Draco as Harry's partner. Draco didn't mind the wait. He was still too pleased with himself for getting Harry a companion who could accompany him into battle—when he was allowed to do so—and with both animals for surviving Nihil's attack on the trainee barracks. They had fled to Granger and Weasley and shadowed them all the way to the training camp.

"Thank you," Draco said quietly, when Flash leaped up from his perch on the back of their bed and flew over to take the letter. Flash beat his brilliant wings once in irritated acknowledgement and then soared out the top of the tent.

Politesse came over and stood swishing his tail back and forth, while staring at Draco. Draco picked up the little dog and held him close, stroking his short grey fur. Politesse sighed in response and turned his head to watch the way Holder had gone.

"I don't like her either," Draco agreed. "But we only need to work for her at the moment. I think _she'll _be very interested in working with me once we explain the situation to her."

Politesse lowered his chin to rest on Draco's arm in response. Draco stroked his fur and watched the tent flap, waiting.

He didn't have long to waste in that. The flap pulled back abruptly and Auror Gregory stepped in, asking as she came, "Is there a reason that you wished to interrupt my practice with my students?"

Draco eyed her for a moment without answering. Gregory was like Holder in the haughtiness of her expression and the way she moved that betrayed her training, but Draco had never seen her keep her temper under provocation as Holder had done this morning, or so coldly respond to someone. She had launched curses at him when she thought Draco was working with Dearborn, one of Nihil's identities, and already corrupted by him. She took some delight in taunting people who didn't know what they were doing. Draco had to admit that Jennifer Morningstar, the Auror who had taken her place as Combat teacher when Gregory fled the Aurors, was probably a better instructor, but he knew where he stood with Gregory.

_If I can persuade her to stand in the same place. _But since she hated Nihil, Draco thought he could.

"I was with Holder," he said. "She wanted to know what torture techniques would work on Nihil, since he formed out of an experience of torture."

"I heard that much." Gregory's hair swished against her cheek as she nodded. "But what does that have to do with me?"

Draco leaned forwards, ignoring the way Politesse growled. Even though Gregory's attack had happened before Draco acquired Politesse, the dog seemed to regard her as a menace. "She also sought to make me tell her what sorts of torture would work against Harry."

Gregory snored. "Despite what you might think, Malfoy, going against your precious Potter does not automatically make one evil."

"But it wastes time," Draco said. "I know now that it won't matter to Holder, and probably not to Robards, how many professions of loyalty we give, and how often we obey them. They'll still treat us like outsiders. I want more power than they'll give me. I think you can help me with that."

Gregory studied him. "And what do I get out of it?"

"A way to defeat Nihil," Draco said. "I'm certain that he's afraid of torture, but I need someone who won't try to use the information I give against my partner in the mistaken belief that any two necromancers are the same."

"I could decide to torture Potter," Gregory said. "You never know."

Draco laughed openly at her. "You don't do sly well. And I think that you're more concerned about Nihil than about us, as long as we don't turn traitor to your precious Aurors."

"There's that, isn't there?" Gregory had a bright stare when she wanted to use it, like a blackbird's. "Very well. But I hardly think that Holder and Robards will let you stop helping her. What are you going to do about that?"

"Feed her false information," Draco said. "Work with you to develop the real techniques. As long as you think you'll have the stomach for it."

Gregory's smile flickered for a minute. "I didn't always keep ahead of Nihil's spies and fighters, and the ones he sent after me weren't always the living dead," she said. "One of them caught up with us and killed two of the trainees I'd recruited by making them swallow their own lungs. I staked him down and cut _his _lungs out, then kept him alive with certain other spells while I fed him the lungs piece by piece. I think I can do this, Malfoy."

Draco nodded, more impressed than he wanted to show—though he let one gleam of it through, so he wouldn't think he was discounting her. "I'm convinced."

"Good." Gregory whirled and strode out of the tent.

Politesse growled again. Draco stroked his head and shut his eyes, leaning back. One part of his plan—how to develop his weapon against Nihil without going through the frankly hostile Holder—accomplished.

Now he had to discover how to get on the front lines and continue developing into the war leader he knew he could be.


	2. Putting It Together

Thank you for all the reviews!

_Chapter Two—Putting It Together_

"How did it go?"

Harry let the tent flap fall in behind him and embraced Draco, burying his head in his neck. He heard Politesse's growl at being squashed but didn't care, because there were things more important than keeping the dog happy. Draco only chuckled in response to the growl, anyway, and rubbed the back of Harry's neck.

Claws settled on Harry's shoulder as Flash found him, and then the blunt head nudged his cheek. Harry backed away from Draco and went to sit down in a chair, scratching Flash's wing as his head fell back. "Can I just sit here for the rest of my life and never have to have a conversation with Portillo Lopez again?" he asked pathetically.

"I think she might object to that," Draco said. Harry looked over at him and found him leaning forwards, hands clasped, eyes so bright that he must have a scheme in mind. "Was it really that bad?"

"I don't understand the theory no matter how many times she explains it," Harry said. Flash crawled into his lap, and he had to shift around and make a place for the little fire-dancer before he could continue. That was all right. It let Draco consider his humiliating confession while Harry didn't have to look at him. "And how am I supposed to teach this necromancy to someone else if I don't understand the theory?"

"It's a problem," Draco said in a neutral voice, for which Harry was grateful, especially as he thought Draco would have understood the theory at once. "I do wonder if we aren't going about this the wrong way."

Harry blinked at him and sighed as Flash coiled his neck around Harry's hand. The warmth felt good against his skin. "What do you mean? I thought we'd decided to cooperate with the instructors now."

Draco's face tightened as if someone had bound his skin more closely against his skull. "Not when one of them is questioning me about what kind of tortures could be used against you to break you if you ever go rogue."

Harry felt as though a lightning bolt had struck him through the stomach. He sat up, saying, "Tell me."

Draco did, and Harry had to fight to keep from holding Flash too tightly and hurting him. "I don't know what I did to annoy Holder," he said. "Why focus on _me _as the threat and not you? You're the one who has the ownership of Malfoy Manor, the more powerful Dark spells, and the greater intelligence behind you."

Draco had started to answer, but he fell silent at that and regarded Harry with a long, level stare. Harry shifted. Maybe Draco didn't like to be reminded that he'd so recently come into ownership of Malfoy Manor with his father's death.

But Draco said quietly, "You're smart. I've told you that. Just because you don't understand all the magical theories the first time around doesn't mean you're stupid."

Harry sighed and sought for a word that would explain the way he felt. Flash stood up on his lap and peered anxiously into his face, and Harry had to scratch and soothe him, which didn't help the search. But at least Draco was sitting there patiently and waiting for him, so Harry could take his time.

"I know that," he said finally. "But I make my best decisions on impulse, in the middle of battle. I couldn't tell you that I understand how every single defensive spell works together, or why it's best to use a Shield Charm here and a Summoning Charm there, if you just asked me to describe a fight. It comes naturally to me when I'm acting. Not when I'm thinking." He managed a smile for Draco. "And I think you have to be able to think to be smart."

"There are different kinds of intelligence." Draco had relaxed back in the chair and started stroking Politesse again. Harry had to smile at how much he looked like a picture of an evil genius Harry had seen on the Muggle telly once. "I couldn't do what you do. I'd want to plan too much, and then get nervous that the plans might not work, and spoil them by overthinking." He smiled, though Harry wasn't sure the smile was directed at him. "That's one reason I want to be a leader. I know how to delegate and work with people who can do things I can't."

"Of course," Harry said.

The doubt must have shown through despite his best attempts to contain it. Draco snorted at him. "That's why I think we should call the comitatus together again. They're the best chance we have to resist the instructors' pressure and do something on our own."

"But do we want to?" Harry scratched along the outside of Flash's wings, and he stood on his hind legs, resting his front feet on Harry's shoulders as he crooned. Harry had to duck his head to the side to see around him. "That's what I'd worry about. We haven't achieved as much as we should acting on our own. Isn't it time to listen to them?"

"There's no law that says we can't listen to them and act on our own at the same time," Draco said serenely.

Harry shook his head in doubt, but he knew that shine in Draco's eyes by now. He was going to do what he wanted, and the consequences would fall on his head later, instead of immediately.

_The only thing I can do is be there to help him deal with them._

* * *

Draco stood behind the table in his and Harry's tent, looking around at the other four people he'd gathered there, and hoped his confident stance—direct stare, hands on hips, haughtily uplifted head—hid how nervous he felt. He had been their leader before, but only in small, immediate situations, such as trying to figure out what Nihil wanted in Wiltshire. He was asking them now to accept his guidance long-term.

There was at least one person there who would eagerly do so, which made it easier. Ursula Ventus sat upright on her chair, her legs crossed and one foot swinging, her wand held in her hand. Whenever he caught her eye, she smiled and nodded. Ventus was a bit mad, caring only for war, but she had declared her loyalty to Draco early, and that was calming and comforting right now.

Beside her sat Weasley, who regarded Draco with a cautious glance. Draco nodded to him, too, though he knew he and Weasley didn't have anything like the amicable trust that connected him and Ventus. Weasley had saved Draco's life, and he had objected and fought against him dating Harry every step of the way. Who knew how he was feeling at any particular moment? Draco was of the opinion that even _Weasley _didn't know his own feelings most of the time.

Except maybe love for the woman who sat beside him, Draco had to admit. Weasley and Granger's relationship seemed more stable than his and Harry's.

And then Draco wanted to cover his face with one arm, because he had just admitted that something between _Granger _and _Weasley _might be worth having.

He shoved the thought determinedly away and studied Granger as she was studying him, the way he might regard a recalcitrant potion. She didn't move, but sat there bolt upright as though someone would walk in at any moment and accuse her of slumping. She had worked with Draco, too, and also accused him of trying to seduce Harry for his own evil ends. Draco never knew what part of her would be uppermost regarding him.

And then there was Harry.

Draco let his gaze linger on Harry's face, as much to build confidence as anything else. Harry was smiling gently at him, face resigned, as though to say that he knew Draco would fuck up but he would support him anyway.

_He really is the best thing that's ever happened to me._

The sentimentality of that thought was disturbing, and Draco pushed it away and cleared his throat. "The comitatus needs to act."

"Of course we do," said Ventus, who was always ready to act. She leaned forwards. "Where are we going?"

"Well, for the moment, we're going to stay right here," Draco said, and ignored her disappointed frown. "We have to learn as much as we can from the instructors, and Harry and I are under informal watch. Luckily, we do have an ally working with us. Auror Gregory wants to get rid of Nihil as much as we do."

"I don't know what she can do that she's not already doing," Granger muttered. "She disciplines people brutally."

"We have to get into one of her classes, first," Draco said. "Harry and I have been so busy with Portillo Lopez and Holder there hasn't been a chance, but we plan to go out and join one tomorrow." He hesitated. This would be the point of conflict, because even if Granger and Weasley accepted him as leader, that didn't mean they obeyed his will unquestioningly. "We all should."

Silence, and then Weasley said, "Oh, yes, we'll just do that, in between the drills with Morningstar and Lowell and Weston's frantic efforts to forge us into a partnership and Coronante and Davidson acting like we'll die _tomorrow _if we don't learn how to disguise ourselves and track people and Ketchum stuffing tactics down our throats. Not to mention this meeting." He shook his head. "There aren't enough hours in the day, Malfoy."

"We can make the hours," Draco said levelly. "For example, if you and Granger spent less time—what was the phrase?—ah, yes, _having private study sessions, _you'd have a lot more time."

Weasley flushed. Granger just regarded Draco with that polished look of disdain and said, "Leisure time is essential to make sure that we don't get swamped with our duties. I don't want Ron to break down, and _I_ don't want to break down, because we're pushing ourselves too far and too fast and never relaxing."

Draco nodded. "I know. But it does mean that you can stop some of your snogging sessions and attend Gregory's class."

Weasley said, "Oh, yeah? And will you and Harry do the same thing?"

"Harry and I have barely been alone since we arrived here, thanks to the Aurors' distrust of us," Draco said smoothly. He didn't look at Harry, whom he knew would be blushing redder than Weasley. "But yes, we intend to focus most of our efforts on the war with Nihil." He did glance at Harry then, to receive confirmation.

Harry took a few deep breaths, as though nerving himself for battle, and nodded. "I want him dead for everything that he's done to Draco and me," he said, "and everything he'll do to people in the future. So, yeah."

Not the most eloquent testimony in support of him, but Draco hadn't chosen Harry for eloquence. He faced Weasley and Granger again. Ventus, of course, looked eager to do anything that would get her closer to the war with Nihil. "Do you understand? Gregory's class is going to be important because she's our ally and because she'll help me develop methods of torture that actually work on Nihil's servants, rather than harassing me to tell her about things that will work on Harry."

Granger started to answer, but Weasley interrupted with another firestorm of red starting in his face. "What, they wanted you to hurt _Harry? _That's—that's _stupid_."

"I quite agree," Draco said. "But yes, Holder was questioning me about what Harry was afraid of in the way of pain, and when I asked her why that was important, admitted that she thought Harry was a necromancer who might turn on us as Nihil did and that she wanted a way to combat him if that happened."

"It's outrageous," Granger said, "but we still haven't discussed whether using torture is moral."

Draco rolled his eyes. He had thought Granger was past that, since she hadn't brought up the way that he tortured Aran again. Still, he might be able to get around her on the grounds of sheer practicality. "Look at it this way," he said. "Do you know any other way to stop Nihil? Other than Harry's necromancy, which he can't share with anyone so far and which Nihil might find a way to get past."

"Fight him," said Ventus. "Kill him."

Draco smiled wryly at her. "We have to discover _how _to kill him first. If he's connected to the forces of life and death, then it won't be as simple as marching up and sticking a knife in his heart, attractive as that option is in some ways."

"There's a poison or a blade out there for everything," Ventus said, sounding as though she was quoting someone. Perhaps her father, Draco thought. He knew her father had been a War Wizard. "We only have to locate the one for Nihil."

"And that's what we're trying to do," Draco assured her. "If _some _people will stop being stubborn because they have moral problems with one of the few weapons proven to work."

Ventus looked at Granger. "Stop it," she said.

Granger ignored her, although the way her jaw tightened made Draco suspect that took some effort. "You still don't understand, Malfoy," she said. "My concern is that we might use torture on Nihil's servants and subjects and maybe even to kill him—or at least frighten him to death—and then have to live with ourselves afterwards."

"I certainly _hope _that we'll have to live with ourselves afterwards," Draco said. "Much better than the alternative."

Granger ground her teeth. Weasley put an arm around her shoulders and glared at Draco, but didn't seek to interfere. He knew when he was outmatched, Draco thought in contentment, and would let his girlfriend match wits with Draco instead. Paradoxically, that showed that he might have more sense than Granger in some respects.

"I meant," Granger said, "that we'll have to deal with what we've become, what sorts of corruption we've introduced into our souls. The Ministry is corrupt enough already. Do you want it to license torture?"

"Robards already wants us to," Draco pointed out. "Holder was asking me questions because supposedly I can her develop torture techniques to use on the people Nihil infects. If what you want is official disapproval, I don't think you're going to get it."

Granger opened her mouth, then closed it and, for some reason, looked appealingly at Harry.

Harry hesitated, then caught Draco's eye and murmured, "It got so that, during the war, I thought nothing of using the Cruciatus Curse for a pretty minor reason. That was after I'd used the Imperius Curse and a couple other spells that I'd thought I would never use. The same thing could happen here. What if we go on using torture after the war and liking it?"

Draco gazed fearlessly into Harry's eyes. "I think you're too good a person to do that," he said. "Do you wake up at night sweating and gasping because you haven't used the Cruciatus Curse that day?"

"Maybe I'm that good a person," Harry said. He looked miserable, and Draco wondered why he was so unhappy making this argument, and why he would make it, at Granger's instigation no less, if he didn't believe in it. Or maybe he was just unhappy about saying something he did believe if it went up against Draco. "But how can we know everyone will be who uses these techniques?"

"I don't believe in the notion of corrupting your soul," Draco said. "I don't believe that you take one step on a 'dark path' and it somehow compels you along after that."

"But there are lots of examples," Granger said, taking up the thread of the argument again. "After all, the Dark Arts are mostly banned because they're tempting and someone who uses one spell will use others."

Draco smiled at her. "And you _know _that I've used Dark spells," he said. "Do I look as though I was an addict to you? Do you think I'm unable to control myself and that I'll use Dark spells just to be using them?"

Granger opened her mouth, then stopped and peered closely at him. "Well, the analogy of Dark Arts to torture isn't perfect," she said. "Obviously."

Draco nodded. "Despite all that was wrong with him," he said, "Dearborn taught us a number of sensible things. Including that the Ministry often bans the Dark Arts for political reasons, not because they're evil. I'm going to stick by that, and say that I can use torture without acting as though I'll be a torturer for the rest of my life because of that."

"I don't see how I can support this," Granger said.

"Then don't," Draco said, changing tactics again. He didn't really care if it made him look inconsistent or false to Granger. He wanted to win the argument and get her to go along with the rest of the comitatus, not make her approve of him. "I'll be the one who does the torture, and all you have to do is step back and smile."

"I mean that I don't know if I can do even that," Granger said, shifting as if she would rise to her feet.

Draco's temper snapped. He moved closer to her. Granger sat still, probably because she knew as well as Draco did that moving now would make her seem weak. But her white knuckles betrayed her agitation.

"I'm sure that the people who die because of Nihil will be comforted by the notion that at least we didn't use torture to oppose him," Draco whispered. "I'm sure that your Gryffindor spun-sugar morality can provide a shield against the limbs of a corpse. Why don't you go out and offer that protection to people who are his victims or lose family members to him? Why don't you teach them how to shield themselves with words?"

"This is more complex than you're making it appear, Malfoy," Granger said, and her thumbs ground down into her knuckles. "You're making it _too simple_."

"In war, things are simpler than normal," Draco said quietly. "That's just the way it is. Could you pause during the war with the Dark Lord to question every single Death Eater and find out whether they wanted to be loyal to him? Or did you just have to assume that they were and attack them when they found you?"

He rubbed his hands on his trousers as he spoke, and wondered if Granger would notice. Months of crouching beneath the Dark Lord's rule, and then the rule of the Carrows at Hogwarts, and hoping and praying that someone wouldn't notice his obvious (to him) lack of enthusiasm, because then he might die.

"That was different," Granger said. "It was an actual war."

"And this isn't?" Draco stepped back and considered her. "What else does it have to have to convince you? More marching armies? Greater or lesser use of necromancy? Nihil appearing on the battlefield with a white mask and dark robe?"

"The people we're fighting aren't those who've chosen to be loyal to a madman," Granger said. She did stand up now, and forced Draco to take a step backwards so that their heads wouldn't slam into each other's. Granger smiled sweetly at him, and Draco fumed in silence, sure that she had done that on purpose. "These people are innocent victims, called back by Nihil or infected by him."

Draco touched his left sleeve. "If you think that everyone who followed the dark Lord _chose _to be loyal to him," he said, "you're wrong."

Granger's confident expression faltered. Then she shook her head and said, "But it's more of them than Nihil's followers."

"That, I will grant you," Draco said. "But once again, you're making an argument based on personal experience and morality that will do _nothing_ when Nihil comes hunting people who have no one to protect them. If we torture, then I'm not arguing that we'll protect everyone in the war with its effects, but we are more likely to stop Nihil and so stop him from doing horrible things."

Granger clenched her fists. Weasley stood up next to her and touched her shoulder. Draco heard him whisper something to her that sounded like, "We thought that was a simple war, and now it turns out it wasn't. That's something, huh?"

Granger laughed aloud and then relaxed her hands. When she looked at Draco, it was with hostile eyes, but a resigned cast to the rest of her expression. "If you need to, then you can do this," she said. "But I won't do it, and Ron won't do it, and if I see that you're becoming corrupted, I'll do something about it."

Draco bowed a little, never taking his eyes from her face. He didn't know if he and Granger would ever get along, but more and more, he thought of her as an opponent he could respect. "Very well."

"Are you going to do it, Harry?" Granger asked, turning to Harry as though their prior conversation had somehow led up naturally to that.

_And now I'm losing respect for her again, _Draco thought crossly, and glanced at his lover. Harry rubbed the back of his neck and looked at the floor as if embarrassed. Draco wondered if he should intervene, but it would look weak of him to try and cross out Granger's question with his own words, so he remained silent.

* * *

_See, this is why I feel stupid next to the two of them—and Draco can talk about different kinds of intelligence all he likes. I would never think of these things. I would never be able to argue against one of them if they were arguing with me. It's impossible._

But Hermione had acted as though his answer was important, so Harry looked up and did his best.

"I'm going to help," he said. "I don't know how much use I would be with the torture spells, but I would support Draco if that's the only way we can defeat Nihil. With my necromancy, though, it might not be the only way."

Hermione had a complex expression on her face. Harry wasn't sure if she approved of what he'd said or not. He looked at Draco.

Draco was watching him with a faint smile near the corner of his mouth, although his eyes were steady and serious. "Good," he said.

Harry must have showed his response to that more obviously than he wanted, because, as Ventus was leaving the tent, she stopped by him and bent over to whisper, "I know. I feel that way when he looks at me, too."

Harry stared at her, wondering if he had more rivalry for Draco's affections than he knew. But Ventus rolled her eyes and said, "He's my leader. That's all I meant." She patted his shoulder and departed through the tent flap after Ron and Hermione.

"So," Draco said. Harry glanced at him and saw him bite his lip once before he looked at the floor. Strangely, that gave Harry more confidence.

_I'm not the only nervous one._

"So," Harry said. "Let's get started as soon as possible."

If he never did anything else to help the war, he thought later, the way Draco looked up then, with swift, bright eyes, would stay with him.


	3. Round of Daily Life

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Three—Round of Daily Life_

Gregory turned her head to study Harry and Draco with a glinting eye as they joined her class. Harry tried to tell himself that he'd faced more fearsome people than her, but at the moment it was difficult to remember who qualified, except for Nihil.

"Ah," Gregory said, loudly enough that half her students stopped practicing and looked their way. The others kept on feverishly working. They'd probably had enough of their share of distractions, Harry thought, and learned to resist them. "I wondered when you would begin to acknowledge that you needed my help."

Draco watched Gregory as if he were a predator equal in weight and deadliness to her. He probably was, Harry acknowledged to himself. He didn't think _he _was.

"We're here to _learn_," Draco said. "If you can't supply that, then we'll find another teacher."

Gregory sneered and stalked quickly towards them, her robes flapping around her ankles. Harry watched her warily. When she'd acted like that in the past, she had usually attacked him in the next moment or two.

This time, she didn't, but simply halted in front of them, watching them with disdain. "I can teach you," she snapped, suddenly enough that Harry jerked a little. "If you're willing to admit that most of what you've learned from that bitch Morningstar is useless and has to be learned over." She tilted her head towards her practicing students, most of who were acting in pairs or fighting a student Harry assumed was more advanced two-to-one. "All of them had bad habits I had to get rid of."

"We're willing to learn, yes," Draco said. "If you're willing to teach, which I find myself increasingly doubting."

Gregory gave him a thin smile and beckoned at them as she turned back to the practice. "Come with me. Perhaps we can find you a willing partner, assuming that anyone else is willing to put her education on hold to attend to _you_."

Harry shook his head as they followed. He knew that Draco and Gregory were probably putting on this show to convince anyone watching that they weren't allies, but he thought a bit less hostility could have accomplished the same thing.

"You know each other's strengths and weaknesses," Gregory was saying as she signaled to one of the groups fighting two-on-one. They stopped, tossing hair or wiping sweat out of their eyes. Harry studied them. Two of them were women, thin and wiry, and the man was large enough that Harry knew what was going to happen even before Gregory spoke. "Natural enough, as you're partners. But you have to study the strengths and weaknesses of others to have any chance at all. Potter. wrestle Windborne here."

Windborne, the wizard, stepped forwards and stretched out his arms. Harry doubted he was as stupid as Dudley, but he remembered what had happened when he was a child and Dudley asked him to "wrestle."

He had no intention of feeling his ribs knocked out of alignment because he wasn't as strong. So he doubled around—he would have used a spell ordinarily, but Gregory liked to emphasize the training of their bodies and probably wouldn't appreciate the use of a wand—and kicked Windborne hard in the side of the leg, as Morningstar had taught them to do with larger opponents. Windborne staggered to the side, not falling but losing his balance badly enough that Harry knew he could have taken him in a fight.

"Enough!" Gregory said. She leaned forwards, hands on her hips and eyes blazing so brightly that Harry wondered for a minute if she had been looking forwards to Windborne hurting him. "Potter, what part of _wrestle _didn't you understand?"

"I would have lost," Harry said, meeting her stare for stare. "I'm not good at that kind of fighting. I thought you were here to teach us to use our advantages, not struggle with tactics that we can't use."

He heard Draco put his head in his hands, but he kept his gaze stubbornly on Gregory. Yes, he had given in and played by her rules when she was an instructor and he was a lowly trainee, but he wasn't going to do that now. She would either teach him something useful or nothing at all.

Then Gregory gave a great shout of laughter that scattered the battling trainees all out of order. Harry thought they had probably seen plenty of new students approach her and get tested, but her laughter was a sign of the apocalypse.

"Very good," Gregory said. "Yes, Potter, you'll need to use movement and speed to counter the strength of some of your opponents. I won't ask you to wrestle again. But you and Malfoy _will _be fighting separately."

Harry nodded. He hadn't expected anything else.

"Malfoy, come this way," Gregory said. "I want you to meet Jackson. Potter, Windborne, continue fighting."

Harry winced and turned back to Windborne. He hadn't meant to make a bad example of the bloke, but he could see that his face was grim, and he would probably do his best to hurt Harry now, to get his pride back.

_Well, I've survived worse._

* * *

Draco could feel his face burning as he tried to sit comfortably on the muddy ground in the circle that surrounded Weston and Lowell. Kelly Jackson, his opponent in Gregory's class, had deliberately kicked him in the arse. He had a huge bruise there—he'd had Harry check—and it made him want to squirm.

Pride was stronger than pain, though, as it had always been for the Malfoys. He sat still, arms folded, and watched Lowell step towards him.

The man was Weston's partner, and also had compatible magic with her. They had taught Harry and Draco privately in the barracks how to begin handling their magic and to do such tricks as channeling it through each other's wands. Draco had thought the same thing would happen in this class, though of course most of the other students didn't have compatible magic.

Not so. Instead, Weston and Lowell were forcing partnerships together and teaching them to trust each other in a flurry of activity. Draco didn't know what the class had to offer him and Harry, already tried and trusted partners for a year and a half, except that they had to give the illusion of obedience to the Head Auror's wishes by attending it.

Now, he watched through half-lidded eyes as Weston walked around Granger and Weasley, telling them that just being in love with each other wouldn't make them good partners. Granger was nearly in tears, while Weasley folded his arms and scowled at the ground.

"Malfoy."

Reluctantly, Draco glanced at Lowell. He couldn't just ignore one of the instructors, either, but it would have been easier if he could, he thought wistfully. "Auror?"

"I want you and your partner to demonstrate the trust test to us." Lowell had an upright stance lately, as though acting like a soldier would somehow hold off the danger of Nihil. "You've been together long enough that it shouldn't be a problem."

Draco reluctantly climbed to his feet, glancing over at Harry, who luckily had heard Lowell and was standing up, too. "We haven't done this particular test before, sir," he said.

"That shouldn't matter," said Lowell. "Not if you're as accomplished as you must be." He turned and nodded to Weston, who was already turning to him. "Leave them. We have a demonstration to arrange."

"I see." Weston watched them with harder eyes than Draco had ever seen her use. Of course, she had been through Nihil's attack on the trainee barracks and the desperate evacuation the way the rest of the Aurors had, an attack Draco and Harry had missed since they were off confronting the shadow of his father at the time. "Well?"

"Which test do we demonstrate?" Harry asked. Draco relaxed. He wouldn't have been comfortable revealing his ignorance of what Lowell and Weston wanted them to do.

"The same one we've been showing all morning," Lowell snapped, his impatience obviously wearing through. Draco tried to remind himself that the man had reason to be impatient and that he and Harry could still learn much from a pair of Aurors who had used compatible magic for years, but it was difficult. _I've done more for the war effort than you have. _"The one where you cast offensive spells at your partner and he stands there without a shield, trusting you not to hit him."

"Is that going to work?" Draco demanded. "We do have compatible magic."

Weston stopped walking as though he'd hit her. She traded a long glance with Lowell, and then began to laugh In fact, she laughed so hard that she had to lean against the wooden stump they'd been using in the middle of the ring for students to fall off into each other's arms. Her shoulders shook and her hair straggled across her face as she bowed it, hiccoughs merging into giggles.

"I had forgotten that," Lowell said, with a pale face that showed his irritation. Draco hoped that he would relax soon, or they might need to take him to Portillo Lopez. "Or, at least, not _forgot_, but it was not in my mind." He wheeled back to Harry and Draco. "Then we need you to fight in concert."

"Very well," Draco said. That sounded more like what he wanted to do, and in fact, he was surprised that the Aurors hadn't had the trainees practice dueling more often since coming to the camp. "Who should we fight?"

"Us," Weston said, rising to her feet as if she and Lowell had consulted about this earlier. There was no trace of humor in her face anymore.

Draco tried to catch Harry's eye to ascertain how he felt about this, but Harry looked eager. Draco frowned. He wasn't sure they could best Lowell and Weston, and he didn't fancy being embarrassed.

Still, they took up positions in front of each other, while the ring of trainees moved further back to be out of the way. Lowell spoke as they bowed. "A bow is traditional, but that does not mean you should remove your eyes from your opponents. Many, if they perform it at all, take the bow as a chance to attack early."

Weston's arm lashed out, and the first spell flew towards Draco, a straight but many-forking line of purple light that he didn't recognize.

Harry raised a _Protego_ Shield, and the compatible magic rolled towards Draco in a wave of increased strength. He grinned fiercely at Harry and wrapped both of them in a thick skin of spikes, projecting outwards at different angles to catch and spear the spells that Lowell and Weston hurled.

It was a good thing he had. Lowell and Weston were both quicker than Draco had counted on. Of course, they had years more experience working together, but Draco still didn't like the sense of being outmatched.

They barely seemed to have a pause as the compatible magic flowed back and forth between them, giving the other increased strength from the backwash each time one of them cast a spell. Draco worked furiously at the offensive magic, trying smoke spells and fire spells and lightning spells first, while Harry raised the shields and dissipated the nets, bolts, explosions, and Transfigurations that Lowell and Weston tried.

Draco became lost in the battle, the compatible magic traveling back and forth, regular as a tide and as overwhelming. He saw Lowell stagger from a carefully placed fire spell that struck his wand hand and smiled with pride, but then fell over himself when Weston's latest net tightened around his leg and curled inwards to stab at his thigh.

Harry gave an incoherent shout and lurched forwards. Draco snapped his head around to tell him to stay where he was, but it was too late. Lowell had already snared him with a net that snatched him into the air and dangled him there.

The trainees gasped and applauded. Draco gritted his teeth against the pain and reminded himself, again, of Lowell and Weston's experience. They hadn't set out to deliberately humiliate Harry and Draco. Nor was it humiliating to have lost to them.

_Now, if I can only convince myself of that._

"This is the way that a partnership should work," Weston said, turning to the other trainees and flicking her hair out of her eyes. Draco was bitterly pleased to see that he had at least made her sweat a bit. "One partner handling what the other cannot, both of you knowing each other's strengths and weaknesses and striving to compensate for them and use them to your advantage against your opponents."

"One problem with Potter and Malfoy," Lowell said casually, as if he wanted Draco to hate him forever, "is that they have different skills, in defensive and offensive magic, and stay _only_ with them. They need to spend more time studying the kind of spells they are not experts in. And that applies to all of you." His gaze went briefly to Granger and Weasley. "No matter what your specialty, there will be times in battle when none of it can help you. Make sure that you know how to cast other kinds of spells as well, even if you never attain the level of comfort and expertise in them that you do with the more familiar ones."

Draco wondered sourly what Granger's "specialty" was, or what they thought it was. Arguing people to death, perhaps.

Weston flicked her wand, and the net stabbing Draco's leg fell away. He rose to his feet and gave a curt nod of thanks, then glanced over to make sure that Lowell had freed Harry. Harry was breathless and red-faced, but unharmed.

Weston passed close to Draco as she went to pair up a few other trainees. "What you did was impressive," she whispered to him. "You need not fear that we have lost respect for you because you have lost one duel."

Draco gritted his teeth and didn't respond. Of course, most of the magic he knew was Dark Arts, and so unsuitable in a duel with Aurors who would probably stick to their legalistic definitions over winning the war.

Harry must have noticed something wrong, because he slapped Draco on the back as they came back together. "You don't need to worry," he murmured. "Weston and Lowell have been fighting together a lot longer than we have, and using compatible magic for a lot longer than we have, too.'

Draco shook his head. He didn't know how to explain without sounding vain and impossible, but he wanted to say that that wasn't the _point_. Nothing could make him feel better about losing except winning.

_Well, this just means that there are things I can't share even with Harry, I reckon._

* * *

"And when you are in a rocky landscape, with multiple boulders that the enemy can hide behind, you must…"

Harry sighed, and hoped a moment later it wasn't audible. Ketchum didn't have the obstacle courses that he did back in the Ministry to instruct them in Battlefield Tactics, so he mostly lectured instead, and then expected them to retain everything he said.

The trainees sat in a circle around him, some of them, like Hermione, writing frantically. Draco had parchment and had cast a spell that would make his quill take all the notes, while he sat nearby with his arms folded, gaze fixed on Ketchum as if waiting for him to make a mistake. Harry would have asked Draco for the spell, but he didn't have parchment with him anyway, so it wouldn't have mattered. At least he was certain that Draco would let him study his notes later.

Well, _mostly _certain.

He wished Ketchum would arrange demonstrations of some kind, even if he couldn't use the full obstacle course. Harry learned better that way.

"Trainee Potter, what would you do if your enemy was in a rocky landscape like the one I just described and heaving boulders at you?"

Harry jolted back to the present. Ketchum was standing over him, staring into his face with his hands on his hips. He looked worn and tired, Harry thought, staring up at him, his dark skin almost grey.

"I would set up a shield to bounce the boulders back at him," he said, deciding to offer the best answer he could rather than admit that he hadn't been listening.

Ketchum sighed. "I know of no one who can manage a Shield Charm that strong, Trainee Potter. Are you certain of your answer?"

"I can manage one," Harry said. "And what else could I do? Hiding behind other boulders would only encourage him to throw _those _at me, and it would be easy for one to roll over and crush me."

Ketchum paused, head cocked. "Why not throw up a screen of dust and small stones in front of him, so that he would lose sight of you for a moment and you could reverse his tactic and hurl boulders at _him_?"

"Wouldn't that only apply if the dirt wasn't hard-packed?" Harry countered. "A lot of places I've seen with boulders have been like that." He was lying outrageously, since he had only once seen a lot of boulders, when the Dursleys had to drag him along on holiday, but it was true of that place, anyway.

Ketchum gave him a thin smile. "I will take into consideration your own abilities and powers when asking you questions in the future, Trainee Potter, as well as the fact that your attention tends to wander during discussions like this."

Harry felt his face flush as Ketchum returned to his central place in the circle, and caught Draco's sarcastic gaze. "Next time, let me study your notes," he whispered fiercely.

"How was I supposed to show them to you in the middle of class?" Draco countered, and Harry had to admit that he couldn't see an answer to that.

* * *

"Have you thought more on what I said?"

Draco sat quietly in his chair and kept his gaze lowered. Presenting a picture of humility, no matter how false, seemed the best way to handle Holder. He didn't see a reason to do anything in response to this question, for example, but nod.

"Good." Holder prowled a few steps towards him and then stopped. With his head bowed, Draco could see only her feet and the lower part of her robes. "And what have you decided?"

Much as he detested Holder, Draco thought, looking up, the one part of her bearing he did wish he could imitate was her voice. It had a surface like polished granite, giving nothing away and presenting only variations to the individual eye—or ear—that didn't add up to a purchase.

"I've decided that I should work with you calmly and honestly, and not try to think about who these tactics might ultimately be practiced on," Draco thought, and then held his breath, cautiously. It was a complete lie, of course, but then again, he thought this meeting would be a test of his ability to lie to her and get away with it.

Holder moved her head slowly, so that her hair fell equally slowly down her neck and curled onto her shoulders. Draco sat still in response. She used such movements to disconcert people, he was coming to understand, and make them fidget and blurt out incautious responses simply to fill the silence.

"Perhaps you are right," Holder said, "at least as far as it concerns personal loyalties. But your loyalty to the Aurors must be more than merely personal. What would happen if you found someone practicing the techniques you had perfected on an innocent?"

"I'd have to make sure they were innocent first, madam," Draco said. "A thing that's not certain anymore with the infections that Nihil can fill the soul with."

Holder held up her hand. "Everyone here swore the oath that will destroy them if they go into service to Nihil, and which they would have been unable to swear if they were already in his service. Limit your imagination to members of this camp, and see what answer you would give."

_The answer is that I hate you, _Draco thought. And he did, more passionately than he had expected to even after what she did to Harry. Part of the problem was that she kept suggesting further pains she could inflict on Harry, and then watched him as if the mention of those pains was only a test.

Draco didn't know whether they were. He didn't think so, since she hadn't hesitated once to use a painful spell. She would again, if she thought Harry's dedication to the Aurors was less than perfect. And she could find something to base that accusation on, given her marvelously twisted imagination.

"I would have to see what the technique was, and why the torturer was using it in the first place," Draco said, "and make my decision accordingly."

"If you had to make a decision quickly?" Holder pressed closer. "If you didn't have time to ask questions or take other actions that would determine your course without doubt, but must simply _act_?"

Draco felt another pulse of hatred. No matter what he said, Holder would find some way to construe it as wrong. If he said that he would act without thought to stop the torture, she would probably decide that that meant he would act to free Harry no matter what. If he said that he would hold back, she would accuse him of insufficient loyalty to the Aurors.

He could almost have adopted the tactic he knew Harry would use in a situation like this: outright defiance, telling Holder that he knew she was only waiting to trap him and he refused to walk into the trap. But Draco knew the absolute worst thing he could do at the moment would be letting Holder see that he understood and abhorred her tactics. She had to think that he had only a certain threshold of intelligence, or she would no longer believe his lies.

So he lowered his eyes, and murmured, "I would assume the torturer was incorrect, because the oath would surely have destroyed the person who broke it and tried to go into service to Nihil. If he was still alive, that would mean the victim must be innocent."

"You might be incorrect," Holder said at once. "Someone might have found a way to break the oath."

_The oath that you just said was unassailable?_ But Draco nodded and pretended that he was listening, that he agreed with her, that he was wrong and he would accept that and never mention it again.

He didn't think she would ever trust him, and in some ways this pretense was useless. But the more he came to understand her, the better he might be able to protect Harry if she decided to move against him.

_And at the very least, it keeps Robards and Holder herself contented and off our backs, so that we can accomplish our real work._


	4. Beginning to Understand

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Four—Beginning to Understand_

"Your kind of necromancy needs two things to work," Portillo Lopez said, pacing around the edge of the circle that Harry stood in. "Blood and Parseltongue."

Harry nodded and said nothing, because at least these were words he understood, and he didn't want to startle her into another flight of theory. They were out beyond the camp, standing on a trampled shelf of frozen mud. Harry thought this was the same place where Gregory's class had been yesterday, but he couldn't spare much time to think about it right now, when his mind had to be on Portillo Lopez's instructions.

Last night she had started saying that maybe his kind of necromancy wasn't necromancy at all. Harry had ignored that as best he could, and eventually Portillo Lopez had seen the virtues of doing things rather than talking about them.

"I want you to see if you can make it work without blood," Portillo Lopez said, gesturing to the circle of salt around Harry.

Harry opened his mouth, but she shook her head. "I know it didn't work before, but this is a different situation. Practice only. Think about it."

Harry closed his eyes and tried to will that dark shimmer in the back of his mind to move forwards. It eluded him. He hissed a few words in Parseltongue, focusing on the image of a serpent in his mind, and nothing happened. He imagined blood dripping from his finger and hissed again, but the power stayed stubbornly locked away.

He opened his eyes and shook his head. "I don't know how to make it come out," he said.

"We will learn." Portillo Lopez, who had settled down on her heels beyond the circle, smiled at him. "We have time to do this."

"Until Nihil attacks again," Harry muttered.

"Even more than that," Portillo Lopez said calmly. "After all, your kind of necromancy has proved to be a weapon against him, but not the only one. As long as he did not kill you in the battle, we would have the chance to experiment again with your magic." She stood rearranged her robes around her, and picked up a jar that shone red. "Let us try it with the blood of a goat."

Harry started at her. "I thought you only agreed to this in the first place and thought my necromancy wasn't evil because I was using my own blood!"

"This is for the sake of experiment, and it's the blood of an animal, not a human." Portillo Lopez waved her wand at the jar's lid and enchanted it into a kind of beak that Harry supposed would make her able to pour the blood more easily instead of wasting it in one place on the circle. "Stand still while I begin. We will try a mixed circle of blood and salt, and then one without any salt." She began to pace the outside of the ring, handling the jar so carefully and precisely Harry thought she must have done this before, whether she was part of an Order of necromancer-killing assassins or not.

_Well, she could have learned by observation, I suppose, _Harry thought, shifting uneasily. _Or she could have observed necromancy rituals and picked up the majority of what she needed to know from them._

"There." Portillo Lopez stepped back, eyed the circle around him critically, and then nodded. "Now try."

Harry hissed. The dark shimmer seemed to pour into his mouth and hover there, filling his mouth with a kind of magical bile. Harry spat, and then took up his wand and cast a glamour, hardly thinking about what he was doing.

The spit and the illusion met in mid-air. Harry hissed some more, and the words seemed to twist in his ears. He barely knew what he was saying, like someone babbling in the middle of a fever dream and hoping that someone else would understand. But it worked, the illusion pulsing in and out and then becoming a gigantic rattlesnake with shadowy grey scales. It flicked its tongue at Portillo Lopez, just on general principles, before it turned its head and looked at Harry.

_Come here and defend me, _hissed Harry, not sure that it would work. So far, he had used this kind of magic mostly in battle. Possibly the snakes that he created wouldn't know anything except how to attack.

But the rattlesnake slid over to him and climbed his arm, coiling around his shoulders. Harry flinched a little, but felt nothing except a faint coolness where the blood-powered illusion pressed against his skin. The rattlesnake turned its head vigilantly from head to head, tongue continually testing wind currents invisible to Harry.

"I was right," Portillo Lopez breathed, gazing up at the snake with a rapturous expression that made Harry instinctively shift to shield it a little from her gaze. "In what I said yesterday. This is not necromancy."

"Really?" Harry snapped. His nerves were on edge, the magic playing around and through him as if the rattler was connected to the middle of his soul by an umbilical cord. He hadn't felt that before, and he suspected it was because he _wasn't _in the middle of battle and was hanging on to the conjured snake instead of using it. "What makes you say that? Blood ritual, Dark magic, ancient language that's not English for the spells—it sounds like necromancy to me."

Portillo Lopez turned her head and gave him a brilliant smile. "But you are not in contact with the realm of the dead, and by definition, that is what necromancy is."

Harry rubbed his forehead, which had chosen that moment to ache. The snake hissed and started to slither down his shoulder, aiming for Portillo Lopez, because it seemed to think she had caused the headache. Harry curved an arm around its body and held it still, though he knew even as he moved that one couldn't do that with a being of pure magic. But when he ordered it to stay, it did. "I don't know what you mean."

"You didn't get this from Nihil, although it may have appeared for the first time after the battle with him," Portillo Lopez said. "Where does your Parseltongue come from?"

Harry hesitated. Then he said, "Well, I did find out that I'm descended from the Peverells, who were the same family that Voldemort came from. If he had the ability to speak to snakes, then I could have it, too."

"But there is another possible explanation," said Portillo Lopez, and her eyes went to the scar on his forehead.

Harry swallowed and stroked the snake, mist brushing against his hands. "Yeah. Albus Dumbledore said that Voldemort could have transferred Parseltongue to me when I was a baby and he tried to kill me."

Portillo Lopez nodded. "And then, during the war, you survived the Killing Curse again. I would not be surprised if that transmuted the previous connection you had with _him_, transforming ordinary Parseltongue into something deeper and darker, something connected with the forces of life and death that Voldemort helped to knock out of balance."

"That doesn't explain why I can use this to fight Nihil, though," Harry said, staring down at the snake. It looped his fingers, watching Portillo Lopez with a gaze that Harry thought was unnaturally intent until he remembered that snakes didn't have eyelids and of course couldn't blink.

"It doesn't," Portillo Lopez agreed calmly. "Not yet. For that, we will need another theory, or more likely, a development of this one."

Harry groaned and buried his head in his hands, and then had to grab the snake again as it tried to reach her.

* * *

"What other means of strangling might be effective, if the first spell you used was a strangling one?" Gregory murmured, her quill flying over the parchment in front of her.

Draco smiled and bent forwards to study the drawings she was making—drawings of nooses, of people choking themselves, of disembodied hands laced together around necks. "It should be whatever method is most similar to the tortures of the Death Eaters," he answered. "Nihil was created from fear of _that _particulate kind of torment, and we can tap most effectively into his memories with the use of it."

Gregory nodded. "But we are far from the Ministry's records of that particular kind of torture, and I don't know that I can easily search for them without being seen." She leaned back with a toss of her head. She was in Harry and Draco's tent, where she'd come under a Disillusionment Charm, and she made it seem smaller even while standing still.

Draco smiled and turned, Summoning the object he was thinking of nonverbally, to increase Gregory's surprise when it showed up. He'd thought it destroyed along with most of his and Harry's other possessions in the barracks at first, but apparently it had its own protections. It had appeared quietly, sitting on his table, a few days later.

Gregory cocked an eyebrow. "I doubt that a Pensieve will help us now."

"This was the Pensieve of my old Potions professor, Severus Snape," Draco said simply, placing his hands on the edge. "Among other things, it contains memories of what the Death Eaters did, and it contains the locations of the places they brought their victims."

Gregory turned her head to the side and looked down at her drawings again as if bored, but Draco knew her well enough by now to be sure that it was only a measure to try and hide her interest. "Well," she said softly. "You haven't volunteered this information before."

"I didn't see that I needed to," Draco murmured and then waited. If she was going to bring this up as a possible barrier to working with him, he would be more cautious about how much he cooperated in the future.

One moment went past like the tick of an invisible clock, then another, and Gregory chuckled abruptly, the way she had when Harry had spoken his mind last week. "Probably wise. Let's begin." She turned and picked up a piece of parchment and a quill.

Draco frowned. "You don't wish to put your head into the Pensieve and see the memories for yourself?"

"I assumed there was a level of privacy and secrecy there that you would like preserved." Gregory peered at him. "But if you don't mind my seeing things that I might employ later in other contexts, of course I would be happy to—" She reached out.

"No, that's all right," Draco said hastily, and pulled the Pensieve back towards him. Gregory gave him a superior smile, which Draco conceded was less annoying than pursuing the Pensieve, and poised her quill again with a flourish.

Draco lowered his head and plunged again into the surface of the Pensieve, wondering what Professor Snape would say if he knew that his memories were being used to help Aurors who would have arrested him on sight in life. Perhaps he would be displeased, and Draco did feel a worm of guilt squirming in his belly when he thought about it.

On the other hand, Draco also liked to think that he would have enjoyed the irony.

* * *

"I swear, Gregory's class gets harder every day," Harry muttered as he limped through the flap of their tent and let it fall shut behind him, automatically adding the silencing and locking charms that he and Draco had adopted. It was easy to forget that the tents weren't as private as the rooms in the barracks, and that people might spy on them simply because they were the notorious Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter. "Where did Windborne learn to _kick _like that?"

"You know that he's still trying to revenge the humiliation of what you did to him the first day." Draco was bent over a flask, staring at the bubbles in it, and responded only absently. "When he bests you, then he'll give up the grudge."

"But he's beaten me several times!" Harry fell into his chair and closed his eyes, then opened one again. "What are you doing? I thought the Battle Brewing class wasn't being taught here because of the difficulty of finding ingredients for everyone."

"This isn't Battle Brewing." Draco took the flask off what Harry saw was a small fire with a pair of tongs and laid it gently down on the table. "This is an experiment of my own."

Harry peered at the potion and tried to look as intelligent as he could, but he still didn't know very much about brewing, and this looked like a muddy green potion of the kind that Portillo Lopez had hundreds of. "What does it do?"

"If I'm right, then it will enable us to communicate at a distance, more easily than the compatible magic does." Draco gave Harry a smile that might seem vicious to others, but Harry saw the edge of his excitement in it. "After all, our compatible magic can only tell us when the other one's in pain, nothing more than that."

Harry blinked. "Like telepathy?" Draco nodded. "Where did you get this idea?"

"From one of the Pensieve memories that I reviewed with Gregory yesterday." Draco ran a reverent hand down the side of the flask. "There is other information buried in those memories, and while of course I can't compensate for all the books that Nihil destroyed in his attack, it helps to be able to go to the memories of Professor Snape's library. Well," he added reflectively, "it did once I divined the system of organization he was using."

Harry hesitated. "How sure are you that this potion will work?" he asked, and he couldn't keep the suspicion out of his voice, though he really wanted to, for Draco's sake.

Draco glanced up, saw his face, and started laughing. "I'm going to be much surer before I have you drink it," he said, wrapping one arm around his chest as though that would help stifle his chuckles. "I might have brewed something wrong, after all." He paused, and his expression shifted so fast that Harry could almost hear the next words before he spoke them. "Or do you think that I'm so careless with your life?"

Harry shook his head and stood up, coming around the table to put his hands on Draco's shoulders. They were far tenser than Harry would have guessed from his voice. "Of course not," he whispered. "But I thought you might be careless with your own if the potion excited you enough."

Draco nodded, his hand releasing the flask with a small clink. "At least this time, you know that I can't be," he murmured, turning his head towards Harry, "because we both have to take the potion at the same time for it to work."

He leaned forwards, and Harry met him halfway there, so that later it was hard to say whose idea it had been to kiss. Harry wrapped his arm around Draco's shoulders and gave him a furious snog, wondering how in the world they had waited so long to do this after sleeping together at Malfoy Manor. Of course, they didn't have as much privacy in the camp, but that shouldn't matter.

His thoughts blurred and slowed as Draco pushed him towards the bed, and Harry went along willingly, making sure to pull Draco's hair out of order. Draco's face was distant and dazed in the way it tended to get when he was aroused, his cheeks flushed.

Harry reckoned that his looked pretty much the same way, but Draco had never given him a description, so he didn't know for sure.

Draco shoved him urgently onto the bed and then tugged ineffectively at his clothes for a few moments before he gave up and waved his wand. Harry yelped as his robes, shirt, and the rest tore themselves free of his body, without a concern for his skin or his hair, and folded themselves neatly up beside the bed.

"Oi!" he tried to say, but Draco was already drowning the word with his mouth, running his hand down Harry's flank. Harry decided that he could shut up, as Draco so clearly wanted him to do, and go with it.

His hand went straight to Draco's cock; he felt as if he knew Draco better since they'd slept together in Malfoy Manor, and he didn't have to be as careful with him anymore. Draco shuddered above him and gasped out Harry's name wetly into his shoulder, letting his head fall forwards.

Harry shut his eyes—there was something satisfying about having Draco's erection in his hand and not looking at it, just feeling the different shapes and changes in it—and began to wank him. Draco fumbled once as if he was going to try and give back to Harry, but then gasped and gave up, just huddling close instead. Harry curved an arm around his back and kissed his shoulder, wanking him even harder.

"What a charming scene this is."

Harry rolled to the side immediately, shielding Draco with his body as he did so, which was why the launched spell hit him and not Draco. He shrieked as all the muscles in his back clenched at once, jerking him sideways and down, and tried to kick out with his legs or reach his wand, only to find out that he couldn't.

Draco had a better idea, or maybe he'd had his wand closer to his hand. Harry looked up to see him casting with a quick, jerking motion, his teeth bared in a snarl.

He rolled over—the spell in his back was fading, or seemed to be—in time to see Nusquam shudder with the effect of Draco's spell, her hands flying up to claw at her throat. And it was Nusquam, wrapped in the same black robe she'd been wearing the last time Harry had seen her, with long black hair and blue eyes.

Blue eyes that, right now, were bulging as she struggled.

"Take _that_, bitch," Draco snapped, and waved his wand again. Their clothes sprang up to them and enfolded them in waves of fabric that Harry had never known could be so intensely comforting. Harry snatched his wand in his pocket and cast another spell that wound around Nusquam like a net and might keep her down a bit.

He would have cast something else, but Draco slammed a hand onto his shoulder and shook his head. "I'm torturing her with the same spell I used on Aran," he muttered. "Don't distract her or do something that could interfere with that."

Harry blinked and turned his head. Nusquam was on her knees, her face a mess of terror. Her hands hadn't stopped scrambling at her throat, although as far as Harry could see, there was nothing there to choke her.

"The muscles are doing it from the inside," Draco murmured. Despite his face still being flushed and his hair being disarrayed—and the line of his cock against the cloth of his pants, Harry had to notice—he was intent on Nusquam, watching her with a cruel little smile and knowing eyes. "We'll need to make sure that she can't escape, if possible."

"How are we going to do that?" Harry grimaced and adjusted himself, and then tried to pretend that Draco wasn't giving him a knowing smile. "The Aurors couldn't prevent Nemo from escaping. We couldn't prevent Aran from dying."

"I think I know something that might work," Draco said, and then began to chant a long spell. Harry's admiration for him at the moment increased. He didn't think _he _could have remembered a spell like that, fresh from an uncompleted wank and straining to think with a dangerous enemy in the room.

The magic manifested as a coil of smoke that wrapped around Nusquam's throat and hair and then settled into her. Harry shot Draco a sideways glance and waited for him to explain.

"It's a spell that increases fear and makes her think of the thing she dreads most in preference to all other thoughts." Draco might have a reason to look like he had pushed Lowell and Weston flat on their backs in a duel and been praised for it, Harry thought. "Something Gregory thought of the other day. It'll keep her remembering this torture all the time, and actually knock her into reliving it if gets bad enough. She won't get far if she keeps writhing on the floor from the shock whenever she tries to run."

"Will it keep Nihil from reaching out to kill her?" Harry had to ask.

"No idea," Draco said. "But it might be effective, since she's part of him—if we can trust Aran—and he'll be distracted by the same fear when he tries to reach her. Speaking of which, I think the spell has done part of its work by now. Should we see what we can learn for her?" He waved his wand, murmured a _Finite, _and then placed it in his pocket as he knelt down by Nusquam. His erection seemed to have subsided entirely. Harry wished _his _would.

Nusquam opened her eyes slowly. She let her hands fall into her lap, as if she was embarrassed that she'd been touching her throat at all. Harry would have backed away at the clarity of the hatred in her eyes, but he felt his own loathing pulse through him, so strongly that it really didn't matter what she thought or felt. He also didn't care much that Draco had tortured her, because she had tried to kill both him and Draco in the past, and almost succeeded. Maybe that made him a bad person. He didn't really care about _that_, either.

"What, no chains?" Nusquam whispered, voice hoarse and horrible. "You must be self-confident."

"Magic is its own chain," Draco said, with an enigmatic smile that Harry _knew _he must have practiced, and tapped her neck with his wand. Nusquam flinched, and Draco changed his smile into one of his more common ones. "Excellent. Why don't we start with how you were able to get in here?"

Nusquam remained silent, simply staring at him with a scornful gaze.

"Oh, excellent," Draco said again. "I wanted an excuse to use this one. _Legilimens dolens._"

Harry had a minute to think that he almost recognized the Latin of the second word before Nusquam screamed. This time, her hands flew up to claw at her eyes, which had turned some odd, weird, melting mixture of her own blue and Draco's grey. Harry swallowed.

"Bind her hands, would you, Harry?" Draco asked in a calm voice. "They're getting in the way."

Harry tied her arms down with _Incarcerous_, and then watched. If Hermione was right and torture was too horrid a thing to use even on your enemies, he thought he had to duty to watch and not turn away from it.

Draco made a grabbing motion as though pulling a needle out of Nusquam's eyes, and then chuckled. "It's beautifully simple," he said. "I'm impressed they came up with the idea in the first place, though of course constructing and weaving—and testing—the magic would be the hardest part."

"What do you mean?" Harry asked, and hoped that his voice sounded normal. From the sidelong glance Draco gave him, Harry suspected it didn't, though.

"I mean," Draco said, "that their transportation spells focus on specific people they've been in contact with. Make the link strong enough and everything else—wards, other protections, the immense distance between that person and you—falls by the wayside. That's how Nusquam and Nemo managed to appear inside the wards at the Auror training barracks so often, and now here. They have links to you, to me, to Weasley and Granger, and to several other people among the Aurors." He flashed his teeth in a brilliant, bitter smile. "And now I know exactly who those people are, and how to break the links."

He turned back to Nusquam. "I wonder what else I can find out?"

Nusquam whimpered. There seemed to be a sort of hole in her eye when Harry looked more closely.

He swallowed, reminded himself of what Nihil had done and was doing, and watched.


	5. Learning From Nusquam

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Five—Learning From Nusquam_

Draco could not remember the last time he had been this excited. His heartbeat was visible as a blurring in his chest when he looked down (at least before he put his shirt and robe back on). He could not stop smiling, and he reached out several times to put his hand on Harry's shoulder so that Harry could help him balance.

He was aware that Harry was looking at him in concern, but Draco felt he could safely dismiss that. He wasn't going to fall over or faint. It was just that they finally had the chance to learn more than the instructors or Nihil had permitted them to so far, and he was going to take advantage of it for as long as he could, before Nihil came up with some means to recapture Nusquam or kill her.

And _Draco _was the one who had made it possible.

He wasn't weak. He wasn't dispensable. He wasn't incompetent, the way duels with the instructors could too often make him feel. He was himself, with his own set of skills, and if they were skills that others would judge him as evil for, that didn't matter. Most of them had probably already judged him as evil for being a former servant of the Dark Lord.

He wasn't beholden to anyone for this triumph, and it made him feel as if he were walking on light.

The first question, of course, was how to hide Nusquam. Draco had already thought of several possibilities, but Harry was the one who gave him his final idea.

"Aran said that Nihil was like a plant with tendrils twining in every direction," he murmured, staring unhappily at Nusquam. She had fainted and hung in Draco and Harry's binding spells, swaying gently back and forth. "How are we going to keep him from deciding to wither this one?"

Draco paused, then smiled. "Have you ever seen what they do with a climbing plant that they want to go in a certain specific direction?"

"No," Harry said, looking at him out of the corner of his eye. "I didn't grow up in a house with elves for the gardeners."

Draco rolled his eyes. He thought Harry had mostly adapted to Draco being pure-blood and having more money than he did, but every so often he would come out with something like this. "It's a perfectly ordinary technique," he said. "For all I know, _Muggles _use it, and wizards may have picked it up first from them."

That was an incredibly generous concession for him to make, and Harry obviously knew it. He blinked. "All right. Tell me."

"They train the tendrils of the climbing plant to run around the pillars, posts, and gates that they choose for it," Draco said softly, gazing down at Nusquam. She was starting to recover, so Draco Stunned her, wondering if Nihil already knew what had happened. Perhaps he was more reluctant to destroy someone he had grown out of himself, in a way, rather than someone whose body he had taken over, as with Aran. "It's very simple. All you need to do is grab enough of the tendrils and weave them in different directions without breaking them."

"Nusquam doesn't have tendrils," Harry said, as if he thought Draco might not have noticed.

Draco shot him a look of intense irritation, and noticed then that he was still hard. That made Draco feel a bit better about his own level of excitement and inability to communicate with Harry. Harry's head was still swimming with hormones, of course, and he would be thinking about their interrupted session in bed more than about what they should be doing with Nusquam. "I know that. But she does have magic."

"You're going to bind her magic to something the way you'd bind the tendrils of a plant?" Harry blinked. "But what kind of pillar or post or gate would hold her?"

"Well done," Draco murmured, impressed in spite of himself. "Yes, exactly. And I think a stake of pain should hold her."

"Like the spell that you performed to make her relive her torture?" Harry was obviously trying to sound sophisticated and experienced in magical theory at the moment, and Draco bit his lip, because it was adorable.

"This one will be more physical," Draco said, and waved his wand. A sharp corner of air came together and tapped Nusquam's cheek, waking her from the stupor that Draco had cast her into.

"Ah, good, you're awake," Draco said, as cheerfully as though it was a coincidence. Harry had gone still beside him, and just watched. Draco wasn't sure what his attitude towards the torture was yet, and didn't intend asking until he felt like seeing Harry struggle with his words and morals. "Feel this. _Configo bracchios!_"

Nusquam screamed and lunged forwards as a large iron spike manifested and drove through both her hands at the wrist. Draco watched, half-expecting, half-hoping for some spasm of fear or revulsion in himself like the one that he knew Granger would feel.

Nothing happened, though, save a slight shiver of distaste at the sight of the blood. He simply didn't care about the physical safety of people who had tried to hurt him and those he cared for more than once. He had warned the others about that, and they had chosen to ignore the warning. Well, they might.

He Levitated Nusquam into the air and then began casting the spells that would weave her magic around the spike, tying her to the physical pain, to the iron, and to the metal as it existed. He dug into her magical core, glad that she was enough like a human to have one. It made things much easier.

When he put her back down, her power was knotted so firmly around the spike that Draco thought it would probably be impossible to drag her away. Of course, Nihil had accomplished many things that were supposed to be impossible, but Draco thought this would be harder for him to overcome because of the associations of pain.

He turned to Harry, and found him sitting with his eyes averted.

"Is it the blood?" Draco asked quietly. "Or the screams? Or the fact that you simply don't like seeing anyone abused?" He would call it by the name abuse if Harry wanted him to. He was willing to do that.

"None of that," Harry said, as if startled, and he looked back at Draco. "It's the fact that it's you doing it."

Draco blinked. "But you knew I was like this," he said. "You knew that I care about very few people. Those I care about, I will defend. Those I don't, I can hurt without remorse."

"Yes, I knew that," Harry said, in a murmur that Draco had to work to hear. "I just didn't realize how _much _like that you were."

Suddenly irritated, Draco stood up and once again Levitated Nusquam into the air, draping her with a Disillusionment Charm. They would have to move slowly through the camp, but they should make it at this point in the evening, when most of the trainees were resting and most of the instructors were planning how to make things even more difficult for them the next morning. "Then _you_ come up with a way to get the information we need from someone who's absolutely loyal to Nihil, and I'll listen to you. Come on."

* * *

Draco had said he was cold. He had warned and warned Harry, but somehow, Harry hadn't paid enough attention or realized all it meant, probably because Draco was so kind to _him_ most of the time.

_And even then, _Harry thought, as he followed Draco's slow progress through the tents towards the edge of the camp, _we have our rows, and he has his rough edges. But I would never have thought he could do something like this._

What Harry thought of when he saw torture wasn't the way he would suffer if he was the one in the place of the victim, the way Draco seemed to assume. He was thinking of the way he _had _suffered, when Voldemort used the Cruciatus Curse or when Dudley rained down blows until Harry couldn't catch his breath. It wasn't as horrible as what Draco was doing to Nusquam, of course not, but Harry wouldn't wish the way he had felt in those moments on anyone.

And Draco had tortured before, when Voldemort ordered him to and he didn't have a choice. Harry would have thought he would remember those moments and not be able to harden himself anymore than he'd been able to when Voldemort gave the orders.

On the other hand, he _had _done it, hadn't he? Harry could think of some people, like Hermione, who would rather die than do it.

Conflicted, miserable, silent, Harry followed Draco across the camp, and then blinked when they ended up in front of a small tent lying half-collapsed on the ground. A stray fireball had torn through it the other day, and left so little that the tent couldn't be put back up. Harry had assumed that the scraps of singed cloth had been thrown away already.

"We'll salvage what we can and put her in here," Draco whispered, almost directly into Harry's ear. "Then weave the whole with Notice-Me-Not Charms. I don't think they'll have to be very strong. This isn't a high-traffic area, and most of the people around us are too distracted and afraid to examine little mysteries."

Harry nodded. It was a better solution than he would have thought of, and it let them control who would see her. If the instructors knew they had Nusquam, they would take her away, and lose her, and then probably accuse both Harry and Draco of being traitors.

Harry was not sure what Ron and Hermione's reaction would be when they saw the way Draco had decided to hold Nusquam. Ventus probably wouldn't care.

Draco Levitated Nusquam over to the side and, together, they used their compatible magic to lift the scraps of the tent and repair it as best they could. Harry shivered. The _Reparo _rolling from his lips, and the immediate wash of power down his spine, made him feel as if he were bathing in cold, sweet water. Why hadn't he and Draco used their magic more like this outside of battle?

_Because battle is what we've had to do to stay alive, _he reminded himself, and no longer felt so guilty.

When the tent was standing, the cracks in the cloth sealed—although it was only large enough now for one person—Draco levered Nusquam into it. He let Harry cast more binding spells and Silencing Charms, although he insisted that sinking the iron stake into the ground and leaving her entwined with those spells to reinforce pain would be enough.

"If Nihil can get through this, then we'll have to think of something better," Draco said, when Harry asked what would happen if they returned in the morning and found Nusquam gone. He sounded utterly undismayed.

Harry nodded, and then followed Draco back to their own tent, ducking around the sentries. It was easier than it should have been, but Harry knew that was partially because the wards had been tied to the oath they'd taken before they came here. Anyone who had sworn it could go easily back and forth. Anyone who hadn't would be pinned in place by lights, binding charms, and high-pitched shrieks from the wards called shrills.

Draco kissed him once they got back and whispered, "We'll make love tomorrow, all right? I think we've had enough excitement for one night."

Harry nodded and smiled, and lay still in the bed until he thought Draco had fallen asleep. Then he got up and went to sit in one of the chairs. He needed to think, and shifting around next to Draco would usually wake him up.

Was this right?

Harry didn't know. There were answers of different kinds everywhere he looked. Torture was wrong. He didn't want anyone to suffer as he had. That was a given. He could have agreed with Hermione, had she gone that far, without hesitation.

The problem was, Nihil and his followers didn't think torture was wrong. They would hurt and kill as much as they could without any problems, because Nihil wanted to destroy everything. If Harry and Draco and the rest of the comitatus swore they would never perform torture, they deprived themselves of one of the few weapons that could work against Nihil. The only one they would have left was Harry's not-quite-necromancy.

And Harry was so _tired _of the fate of the world resting on his shoulders alone.

Besides, would the rest of the Aurors agree with them? Harry didn't think Holder would. She had no problem practically torturing _him_, and he was supposedly on her side. Draco could make his vow like a good little moral person, but Holder and Robards wouldn't understand and would probably force him to break it.

But maybe that was all too easy, too convenient. Wasn't doing the right thing supposed to be hard?

Harry shut his eyes. If he concentrated, he could bring back how the Forbidden Forest had felt, surrounding him, as he walked towards his meeting with Voldemort and what he thought at the time would be permanent death. His steps stabbed down to the earth, and even seeing the shades of the dead when he used the Resurrection Stone made him feel pierced by sadness, though it had made the walk a bit easier.

That had been the hardest thing he'd ever done, but at the same time, it was _clear_. After he saw Snape's memories, Harry had no doubt what he should do. He still could have refused and run away, but there were only two choices.

Here, he had a bunch of different choices, and there were arguments for all of them, just enough to paralyze him.

He opened his eyes and looked at Draco, comfortably asleep in their bed. He looked peaceful in the dim light of Harry's wand, his eyes shut and his chest slowly moving and his face not showing any of the lines of pain or torment that were supposed to be there after you tortured someone.

_I think that's the best thing I can do for right now, _Harry decided slowly. _Watch him and try to keep him from going too far—although I don't know what "too far" is, either. Maybe I'll know it when I see it. I hope I will._

_But until I can get some clear answers one way or the other, until I can be sure that I'm not just making things worse by reacting, then I don't see what else I could do._

He climbed back into the bed. Draco curled up to him, probably drawn by nothing more than the warmth, but it still made Harry stroke his hair and neck for a long time before he fell asleep himself.

* * *

"I can't believe you did that to her."

Draco found that he didn't feel quite as much triumph in the face of Granger's soft, shocked voice and wide eyes as he had thought he would.

Weasley was quieter than Granger was—Draco thought Granger would find words at the ending of the world—but paler. He had taken one look at the spike that bound Nusquam's wrists and magic and then walked away to the other side of the tent. Or ducked away, more properly, because the tent, even with the addition of wizardspace, was hardly big enough to contain them all. He stood there with his head hanging and one hand playing restlessly with his wand, as if he wanted to hurt someone but didn't know who.

Ventus had looked at the situation, shrugged, and then knelt in front of Nusquam, using her wand to lift the other woman's head. "What can we learn from her?" she asked calmly, eye to eye and not flinching, despite Nusquam's glare.

"I've already learned how they keep getting through the wards," Draco said. "Links, focused on particular people. To break those links, the person will need _Finite Incantatem_ cast on them by several different people."

"Ask her about Catherine Arrowshot," Harry said suddenly.

Draco glanced up at him. Harry was leaning against the central pole of the tent, his arms folded as though trying to keep out a chill. He was looking at Nusquam, though, not Draco, which made Draco feel slightly better about his clenched teeth and shuddering shoulders.

"Yes, I could do that," said Draco. It was a suggestion, a place to begin, and no one else had offered one. Ventus seemed content to let him take the lead, as always. He knelt down in front of Nusquam.

She stared at him as if she was trying to poison him with her eyes. Draco smiled. He might have been affected, but the Dark Lord's eyes were the ones he saw in his nightmares.

"Do you remember the last time I asked for information from you?" he asked calmly. "We can do that again. Or you can volunteer the information." He laid his wand against her cheek and waited for her decision.

"You have no reason to trust me even if I did speak the truth." Nusquam's voice was hoarse, and she paused to trace her lips with her tongue. "I will surrender nothing to you. You must take it."

"As you wish," Draco said with a regretful little shrug. He didn't much enjoy this method, as it was confusing to employ and time-consuming, but it was the only way she had given him. "_Legilimens dolens!_"

This variation of Legilimency was really what the Ministry had moved to outlaw, Draco knew, though they had gone too far as usual and covered all Legilimency with the same blanket. It tore into the victim, filling their minds with pain as it scattered the memories and brought the ones the Legilimens was most interested in to the forefront. Memories could end up damaged, the brain torn open and bleeding magic.

But it worked, you had to say that for it.

He rode down darkness in a wheel of knives, and the pain that he felt was distant from him, the contracting, dying spasms of Nusquam's mind as she tried to fight him off, and failed. Draco thought absently that this technique might be even more effective on someone like her, who feared pain so much, than it was on others.

Memories drifted before him like filthy patches of smoke, and Draco reached up and curled his fingers around the nearest one. Cold and pain passed briefly over him, then dissolved into solidity.

He could see Catherine Arrowshot's face in a dark room, then in a bright one, then in a dark one again. And then more visions appeared, more and more: visions of Arrowshot being tortured, made to bow, laid down and strapped to beds or racks, or taunted by a faceless presence Draco had to assume was Nihil.

Draco sighed and pulled back, hovering. He had recovered the information about Apparating inside wards without trouble, but he was starting to think that was because Nusquam had been primarily responsible for its development. She seemed to be more distant from other thoughts in Nihil's mind.

_Tell me, _he said. _Tell me what _you _had to do with her._

He spoke the spell again, and this time the knives dived into a squealing, churning hunk of flesh and hauled it towards him. Draco reached out and grasped it in his hand as before, but this time it became a vision that made him blink and squint with its brightness.

Nusquam stood beside a chair in which Arrowshot, as usual, was strapped. There was a bored expression on Nusquam's face, and she several times glanced over at the wall as if checking a clock that was invisible from the angle Draco was seeing the memory at. Arrowshot looked agonized, as usual.

"I am ready to begin," Nusquam said, apparently because it was important that the air should know that, and then stepped forwards and knelt, taking Arrowshot's head between her hands.

Arrowshot tried to thrash, but a single word froze her in place. Then Nusquam was gazing into her eyes, and she was weeping, and Draco began to understand what he was seeing when Nusquam parted her lips and blew once, then again, on Arrowshot's hair.

Two pieces of the hair came free and drifted towards Nusquam. Nusquam caught them both and braided them around her fingers. Then she began a soundless chant over them, while at the same time gesturing with her wand towards Arrowshot, weaving a complex pattern of spirals Draco didn't try to memorize. Now that the memory was essentially his as well as Nusquam's, he knew that he could put it into a Pensieve and study it again whenever he needed to.

The spirals solidified and became real, puffing out sparks and smoke that made Draco glad he wasn't trying to spy on this memory in person; he would have coughed and given himself away if he had. They reached out and joined with the hairs around Nusquam's fingers, which she had, Draco saw, wound in the same shapes. Light began to vibrate back and forth between the hair and the spirals of magic, apparently rendering them both more real.

Then Nusquam lifted her head and spoke two names in a bright, chilling voice that made Draco lose any doubts he might have about torturing her. "Harry Potter. Draco Malfoy."

The spirals leaped together and formed two hanging chains of what looked like brass links, though Draco would never have tried to describe them that way to anyone else. Nusquam stood up, spun the chains, and then lashed out with both at once, as though trying to lasso two necks. She vanished with a crack that sounded like the crack of Apparition.

Draco took a deep breath and pulled his mind back from Nusquam's memory. He had no doubt that he had just seen what Nusquam had done before she came here. Obviously, there was a variety of ways to make the links to people that would carry her and her kind past the anti-Apparition wards—Draco had seen others yesterday—but this one was too fresh not to be recent.

It also pointed to another reason that Arrowshot might have been taken. She had associated with both Harry and Draco. Perhaps the link was simpler to create, or stronger, if constructed from the body of a person who had been their ally.

Draco opened his eyes and studied Nusquam. She had settled on a mixture of terror and hatred that Draco would have found frightening on the Dark Lord's face. Once again, she was not the Dark Lord.

"I think we should break the links now," he said. "The links that allow Nusquam and Nihil to Apparate past the wards into buildings and camps, I mean. She may be the one who knows how to use them best, but there is nothing to prevent the others from coming when they realize that she's truly a captive."

"Shouldn't you have done this last night?" Granger asked, her voice harsh. "Rather than _torturing _her? Shouldn't breaking the links be the higher priority?"

Draco shook his head. "Not when breaking them requires so much help. And not when we'll have to think up reasons to convince the other people _they _have links to to let us do it." He drew his wand and looked at Harry. "But Harry and I are two of those people. We can begin it, at least."

Harry nodded and stepped forwards. "What do I have to do?"

Draco smiled. At least _someone_ here had some bloody trust in him.

"Stand under my wand," he said. "No one can break their own link. Someone who knows the procedure will have to do it for them."

Harry stood under the wand without hesitation. Draco touched his cheek and looked into his face for a moment, until he was sure Harry understood what he was trying, without words, to say. Then he breathed into his nostrils and reached out to pluck a hair from his head. Harry winced, but didn't complain.

"_Finite Incantatem_," Draco began, only the beginning of a long, long process.

And Harry stood there and let him do it, while Granger and Weasley averted their eyes when they came over to cast the _Finites _on Harry and Ventus watched with impatient reverence.

_This is the way it will have to be for right now, _Draco thought during a pause in the chanting, when Weasley and Ventus were trading off. _But sooner or later, I should be able to persuade them to my side. Torturing her in this way has not harmed me so far._


	6. Overall

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Six—Overall_

"It makes you difficult to work with when you are hiding things from me."

Draco started and looked up. He had been contemplating what he would be able to do if he could simply keep Nusquam for a few more days and use more complicated piercing and impaling spells, of the kinds that Professor Snape's memories contained. It had made him, he knew, slow and inattentive to what Gregory was doing, but he had not expected that particular remark. "I beg your pardon?" he asked stiffly.

"You are exhilarated." Gregory eyed the list in front of her a moment, and then turned around with that abrupt kind of movement that usually made Draco try to keep his distance from her. "I am able to see this from the way your eyes glow and focus beyond me. And there is nothing to be exhilarated about concerning either your performance in classes or the methods of torture we have discovered. What is it?"

Draco studied her carefully for a few moments before replying. Gregory was more observant than he had thought. He'd never doubted her intelligence, but had counted on the way she tended to focus on one thing at a time to keep his secrets safe around her.

"I have a secret," he responded. "I've won a victory that could make the difference between winning and losing the war."

Gregory leaned forwards and then waited, seeming to assume she only needed to do that to have the secret shared.

"You could tell the other Aurors," Draco said, folding his arms, "or at least the instructors. And that would be the end of it." He was pretending reluctance, but really his mind was racing, trying to calculate the precise chances of Gregory betraying them. He _would _like someone to share this with who would appreciate his skill and finesse in a way that he rest of the comitatus could not.

"What reason have I to tell them?" Gregory tilted her head back, and her eyes were wild and bright and scornful, the way Draco imagines his would look under similar circumstances. "They were the ones who believed me a traitor based on slight evidence. They were the ones who cast me out and turned their backs on me, refusing to spend time searching for evidence that would have proved Dearborn's ridiculous story false. No, I have no reason to talk to them about this."

"Why did you come back and ally with them if you despise them so much?" Draco asked.

"They're my best chance to defeat Nihil," Gregory answered, giving Draco a strange look, as if she had assumed everyone knew that.

Draco pondered one moment more, and then decided to trust her. At least it would be easy enough to use a Memory Charm on her if he turned out to be wrong. Gregory's mental defenses weren't that great compared to her physical ones.

"All right," he said. "I managed to capture one of Nihil's major servants, and so far she's staying where I put her instead of dying or changing into a different body to escape."

Gregory paused. Her hands, resting on the table, began to tremble a moment later. Draco looked at them uneasily and wondered if he had made the wrong decision.

"Nusquam," Gregory said. "It must be. There is no other servant I know of is who both major enough that you could be proud of capturing her and female."

"Well, I could have arrested one of the Auror instructors," Draco muttered, but he didn't think he was that displeased that Gregory had figured it out without being told. After all, it was clear that his announcement itself had surprised her.

"Not without severely disrupting the schedule of classes and the life of the camp." Gregory locked her hands on the table again, this time to hold herself upright, her eyes bright and steady and hungry. "Well, shall we go see her?"

"If you can come up with a good reason to venture out of the camp in daylight," Draco said. "She's in a tent beyond the edge of it, actually easier to reach at night when not everyone thinks they need a reason for your business."

"Or sees you to think they do so," Gregory corrected him. "Yes, in fact, it'll be easy. I'll tell them that I've chosen you to demonstrate some of the more dangerous techniques on, and that I'm worried your partner might think they're abusive. Hence the need for a private place to practice."

Draco nodded, and followed Gregory out of the tent and across the camp. Not many people tried to speak to them, though almost everyone paused to watch Gregory's cold, disdainful face and fast stride. Draco reckoned he could count on that as a safe alibi in one way. No one was going to forget seeing them, but on the other hand, Gregory's company was its own guarantee of a good purpose.

The sentries didn't bother stopping them, so they didn't have to use their story. Draco was pleased about that, since he didn't want Harry to worry.

_More than he already is, at least._

Draco frowned and thought again about what Harry had done in the last few days. He spoke less, and he had refused, with an absent air, Draco's attempts to introduce intimacy into their interactions since they had captured Nusquam. He spent a lot of time looking at the walls of the tent. His essays were sloppier.

He was probably worrying about Draco and when the invisible corruption that was supposed to plague everyone who committed torture would set in. Perhaps he was even worried that it hadn't come yet. At least then he would probably have some solid plan for how to act towards Draco.

Draco rolled his eyes and snorted so loudly that Gregory glanced back at him until he waved her on. _It's ridiculous. He stopped being a Gryffindor years ago, and still he can only see the world through a Gryffindor mindset. I still have Slytherin traits, yes, but at least I can look beyond them and see through other people's eyes._

* * *

"But if it's based on my connection to Voldemort, that's just as bad," Harry said. He didn't know why he couldn't make Portillo Lopez understand that. The latest snake illusion around his shoulders, a python, swayed and hissed, and Harry had to murmur several soothing words in Parseltongue to hold it back from attacking his supposed mentor. "Then it's not something I can teach to anyone else."

"We don't know that yet," Portillo Lopez said, with that unfailingly patient manner that sometimes bolstered Harry and sometimes irritated the fuck out of him. "Let us try one more time." She conjured a mirror and held it floating above her head, then cast another spell that filled it with bright blue and yellow lines. "Bring your snake to look into the mirror."

Harry sighed and asked the python to do so. It flowed down his shoulders with an extreme slowness that suggested it was only doing this to oblige him and then floated through the air to hover opposite the mirror.

The yellow lines disappeared, leaving only the blue ones. Harry blinked. That was the most result they'd had out of any of the tests they'd done so far.

Before he could call Portillo Lopez's attention to that, though, she spoke a single word. The blue lines stabbed out of the mirror and hit the snake like a sunrise.

Intense agony cut through Harry, and he slumped to the ground, so much in pain that he couldn't even cry out. His mouth filled with blood, his hands filled with loose earth as he scrabbled at it, and he tried to grip his wand but simply dropped it. Even when the pain faded, he knelt there, gasping and loose-limbed.

"That proves it," Portillo Lopez said. Her voice was soft and proud.

Harry managed to force his head up, and sternly told himself that he could kill her _later,_ when she might deserve it even more. Portillo Lopez was still looking into the mirror, instead of at him. "What did you do?"

"The lines of light in the mirror represented various kinds of magic connected to life and death," Portillo Lopez said. "The yellow lines represented the magic of life. When they vanished, I knew that your magic is not purely based on illusions and Parseltongue."

"And let me guess," Harry muttered. He was feeling a little better, but he still shook his head and moved away to stand up on his own when Portillo Lopez extended a hand. "The blue lines are the magic of death, which means that my magic is necromancy after all."

Portillo Lopez chuckled. "No, because they would not have caused you pain if both they and your magic were part of the same category. Instead, your magic is what I theorized it was, a combination of the forces of life and death."

Harry sighed and leaned shakily against the table that Portillo Lopez had covered with diagrams, drawings, and lists before they began this experiment. Harry hadn't bothered looking at the parchment because he knew he wouldn't understand it anyway. "I still don't see how that helps."

"Don't you?" Portillo Lopez looked at him with a faint frown. Then she nodded. "Of course not. You have told me that you have trouble understanding magical theory."

"Especially from people who hurt me without a moment's notice," muttered Harry. He'd already decided that he didn't want to tell Draco what had happened today. Draco would probably get as angry as he had about Holder, and they might actually need Portillo Lopez.

Portillo Lopez gave him another frown, as if trying to determine what he was talking about, and then took up the thread of her talk again. "You have already used a weapon that combines the forces of life and death. The wand I gave you. The wand affected you, I understand, when you tried to use a blood ritual against this shadow of Lucius Malfoy, but not as badly as it should have. Your magic is a hybrid."

"But that doesn't _help_," Harry said, and raked a hand through his hair. Draco wasn't here to tell him not to do it, anyway. "If it's something so intensely personal, how am I supposed to teach it to anyone else, or help with the battles unless I'm right there?"

Portillo Lopez sighed. "Because I believe we can modify that weapon to yield others that might affect Nihil. And your magic gives us an idea of how to do it."

Harry stared. Finally, a statement that he understood, and one that actually sounded hopeful.

"How are we going to do that?" he asked.

Of course, when Portillo Lopez began to give her explanation, Harry was promptly lost again, but he clung fiercely to that one statement he'd understood. If he could provide some way to defeat Nihil that didn't rely on torture, then he was going to do it.

_Draco's great. He's doing something necessary. But…_

_I just think it would be a good idea to have some other weapon on our side that we could use if we needed to._

* * *

When they came out of the tent that held Nusquam, Gregory was walking with the same flushed face and bright eyes that she had accused Draco of displaying to give away his secret. Draco touched her arm before they got back to the camp.

"You understand why this has to be kept a secret?" he asked.

Gregory snapped him a look of contempt and nodded. "You must think that I'm stupid," she said. "Not trusting me with the secret of Nusquam's capture in the first place. Thinking I would betray you to the other Aurors. What reason do I have to do that? They're allies to me, and nothing more. I told you that before."

"I know," Draco said, but he was thinking: _You and I are nothing more than allies, too. What reason will you have to keep the secret if you decided that someone better had come along, or that you could take better charge of Nusquam than I could?_

He waited until they were most of the way back to his and Harry's tent before he brought up his next idea. Gregory was watching one of her classes at a distance, perhaps with an Eagle Charm on her eyes, and snapping instructions. Draco waited until she turned around with a distinct scowl on her face.

"You know that Nusquam developed the spells that bring Nihil's servants into the center of the camps, behind the wards," he said. "And that those spells are based on links to specific individuals."

Gregory moved her head in answer, but didn't deign to look at him. Draco gritted his teeth and reminded himself that he knew about pride—enough not to let it become a liability.

"We've broken the links on people we can reach," he said. "Harry, I, Granger, and Weasley were all victims of that particular spell. But there are others we can't reach and convince to hold still for the spells—Holder, in particular, and a few of the higher-ranked Aurors, such as Ketchum. Could you come up with a reason for us to cast the _Finites _on them that they would believe, without revealing the secret of Nusquam's capture?"

Gregory stopped walking for a moment, standing there with her foot raised from the ground while she stared into the distance. Then she grinned and nodded. "I can come up with one for Holder, at least. As for Ketchum and the others, leave them to me." She glanced sideways at Draco. "You know that I will have to have the full list of names, in order that I can create plausible stories for all of them."

Draco nodded back, and said nothing else. He had made the decision to involve Gregory in the secret in the first place, and he refused to regret it now. Especially when Gregory sounded like she would be useful to them.

_Especially because regretting it now would give Granger the material to say that she told me so._

* * *

"Potter, Malfoy, stay behind."

Harry winced at the cutting edge in Weston's tone. She hadn't spoken to him and Draco like that in days, and he had finally started to hope that they were good enough to match her impossible standards. Well, their impossible standards, since Weston and Lowell didn't seem to have a lot of thoughts that they didn't share.

_But of course not_, Harry thought gloomily as he trudged to the center of the training ring, slipping twice. The instructors covered the mud with charms to keep it as smooth as the stone of the Ministry during practice, but the spells usually had begun to wear off by the time the class was over. _We can never do well enough to please them._

Weston waited for them in the middle of the ring, eyes narrowed as she surveyed them, arms folded. Lowell stood at her shoulder, but he seemed to have decided that she should handle this conversation. Harry wondered how they made their decisions, then shrugged. He only knew that it was on some level of cooperation he and Draco appeared incapable of reaching.

He looked sideways and found Draco standing there quietly with his eyes narrowed. He looked like a cat waiting for someone to step on his tail, Harry thought.

Then he remembered some of the things Draco had done when he looked like that, and mentally winced.

"Your compatible magic is once again suffering," Weston said bluntly. "Why?"

Harry blinked. That hadn't been what he expected to hear. He cast Draco a glance, but Draco's eyes were as wide and his face as pale as though those words had been a surprise to him, too.

Maybe they were and maybe they weren't, Harry thought. He didn't know that he could read Draco that well anymore.

_And I think that's the problem, _Harry decided after a slow moment, when the answer hit him like a Bludger.

"I think that we're having private disagreements that affect our performance," he told Weston. "It's not the disagreements that are the problem, it's that we're keeping silent about them and not telling each other. That sets up the barriers."

Lowell sagged forwards as though he would fall, and Weston supported him with her back while she gave a low laugh. "Well done, Trainee Potter. I am gratified to see that you recognize the problem." She shook her head. "Now, perhaps, you could go away and repair it, and prevent it from happening at all next time?"

Harry nodded, and then turned to face Draco. He was glad that Weston and Lowell hadn't asked about his problems with Draco, because almost all of them had to do with Nusquam, and that wasn't something they could discuss in front of other people.

Draco stared at Harry, then at Lowell and Weston, nodded once, and turned around to walk with Harry back to their tent. When they'd got inside and put up the wards and silencing charms, he paced in a slow circle before he turned to face Harry.

"Well?" he asked.

Harry had been planning to sit down, but he decided that he didn't want to, and walked closer to Draco instead. Draco stood where he was and watched him come.

Their faces ended up closer together than Harry had planned on, which was a good thing, he decided, because it made Draco look a bit uncertain. This _wasn't _going to be Harry raising silly concerns that Draco would be free to immediately disregard. It just _wasn't_. He was going to talk about things that mattered to him, and if Draco ignored them, that would be grounds for another row.

"I'm worried about you," he said.

"And my torturing Nusquam, I know." Draco nodded, fixing a bored expression over his face like armor. "Granger has already discussed her concerns with me, and until someone comes up with a better method that would intimidate Nihil and his servants as much as the use of Death Eater torture would, then I don't see—"

"I'm worried about you because I think that you're changing into a different kind of person than the one you want to be," Harry said. "And I'm worried for me, too, because I think that I might accidentally do something that would hurt you."

Draco paused, blinking. "What?" he asked at last.

"Listen," Harry said. "During the war, Voldemort ordered you to torture people. You did, but reluctantly. Is that reluctance gone now? Are you the same person you were then, or is it different because this time you're hurting people who have already tried to hurt you in the way that those Death Eaters didn't, or what?"

Draco tilted his head to the side. Harry hoped that he was listening to his own real wishes, rather than the things he thought he had to do to make himself hard and tough for the war.

"I'm not the same person I was then," Draco said at last. "Of course not. And it changes things that Nihil and his servants have hurt you."

Harry nodded. "All right. But how far are you going to go in pursuit of hurting people who hurt me? Torture's included. Killing's included. What about Holder, for example? She hurt me the first day we came to the camp, and I know by the expression on your face when you mention her that you intend to get back at her. Would you torture her?"

"I never even thought about that," Draco said, his face closing up in the way that meant he was uncomfortable and didn't want to discuss this anymore. "The circumstances are different. She's not Nihil's."

"But you described her as an enemy the other day," Harry said. "I heard you. And she hurt me. That puts her in the category of people you've agreed to torture. How far would you go? Would you rack her? Stab a spike through her wrists, the way you did with Nusquam? Strangle her? Read her mind with that painful Legilimency? Flay her? Impale her? Use the Cruciatus Curse on her? Gouge her eyes out? Break—"

"Stop it!" Draco snapped. His eyes were a little wild. Harry wondered if he was making him relive bad memories, and winced—this had been part of why he was afraid—but he wasn't about to back down now. "No, I wouldn't do any of that."

"Then what would you do?" Harry cocked his head. "Why is Nusquam different? Why do you use torture on only some people and not others, after you told me that you used it on everyone who fit into certain groups?"

"You're not—" Draco said, and then closed his eyes. Harry left him alone this time. From the state of his face, Draco was at least doing some hard thinking, and Harry wanted to leave him to work this out for himself.

_Until it turns out he needs help._

* * *

_I never thought of that. I never realized the inherent hypocrisy of promising to destroy someone but not being willing to use methods on her that I use without hesitation on people like Nusquam._

Draco hated recognizing limitations and flaws in his thinking after the fact. He preferred to anticipate arguments before he had them, so that he had the responses packed like shining blades in his skull, to deploy as necessary.

And to find that Harry, of all people, had identified one of those flaws and made him recognize it…

Draco winced. Another unpleasant thing to realize was that he had been surprised by every instance in the last few days of his partner's intelligence.

_He may be stupid about magical theory, but not about other things._

Draco opened his eyes, looked at Harry, took a deep breath that he hoped absurdly would help him, and then said, "You're right. There is a difference in what I planned to do, and it's taken me until now to recognize the grounds of that difference. I didn't think about torturing Holder because, although she's an enemy, she's still human and doesn't serve Nihil. Nusquam is neither of those things."

"So you've been thinking that the only victims of your torture would be his nonhuman servants?" Harry pounced on the information as though Draco had just offered him a peace gesture. "Nemo, and Nusquam, and Nihil himself, and the living dead? If they can even be tortured," he added doubtfully.

"I think they could be, with the same techniques, depending on how much of Nihil's mind was in them," Draco muttered, temporarily distracted by the problem. "In that case, the desire would be to cause them not pain, but fear."

Harry nodded. "But you're only going to torture his nonhuman servants?"

Draco opened his mouth. He _could _torture others. He could nerve himself to it, and it would be easier than it had been under the Dark Lord, because he was an adult now and had been a child then. He didn't want Harry to think him weak.

And then he stopped, because he doubted that Harry would think him weak for admitting his lack of stomach for torture.

"Yes," he said at last. "I am."

Harry smiled at him, and Draco caught his breath. It had been too long since he'd last seen Harry's smile that free and uninhibited. "Thank you," he said. "That was the thing that frightened me most, the lack of clear boundaries. I wasn't sure how far you'd go, what I was allowed to object to and what I wasn't, what might be most important to you and what was trivial. So I stewed and was upset about it, and that caused the barrier."

"Why would you not be _allowed _to object to something?" Draco tried to remember anything he'd said or done that Harry might have thought was an invitation to shut up.

"Because I'm not objective," Harry said. "I've been tortured. That might influence my perspective too much, and I knew that I wasn't really feeling sympathy for Nusquam, just thinking about what I would feel in her position."

"That doesn't matter," Draco said. "I'm not interested in the finer points of philosophy like that. I'm more interested in when you were tortured. I know that you weren't at Malfoy Manor."

"With the Cruciatus Curse when Voldemort kidnapped me after fourth year," Harry said. "And—" He stopped, and an expression of particular stubbornness came over his face. "It wasn't torture. Just bullying. By my cousin."

Draco knew enough to back off. He nodded as though completely satisfied and said, "Then I value your opinion. I'm not going to stop torturing Nusquam. You needn't watch. But I won't torture anyone else unless we capture the others you named. There may be other ways that we could get the information we need from them." He thought of Aran, who had been willing, even eager, to betray Nihil, who had taken him over against his will. There could be others like that.

"Thank you," Harry said again, and stepped forwards to kiss him.

Draco returned the kiss, deepened it to a snog, and tugged Harry experimentally towards the bed.

This time, Harry went along with a laugh that warmed Draco even more than the smile or the kiss had.


	7. Spies, Arguments, and Other Excitements

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_Chapter Seven—Spies, Arguments, and Other Exciting Things_

"He really said that?" Hermione spoke softly, her eyes on the ground as she played with her quill. They were waiting for Ketchum's class to begin, and Harry had taken the chance to speak to her so that she would know what Draco had decided about torture.

"He really did," Harry confirmed, peering over his shoulder at Draco. Draco stared back, eyes narrowing, and Harry waved before he turned back to Hermione. He didn't think Draco would like it if he knew what Harry was doing, but he could put up with it for right now. "It took him a little while, and I had to point out that he hadn't said he would torture people like Holder who had hurt me. But he agreed in the end."

"Agreed to what?" Ron jogged up to join them, looking bright and flushed. He gave Hermione a beaming look. She tried to ignore him, but her cheeks turned pink in a way that told Harry what they'd been doing just before they came to class.

"Agreed to only use torture on a few people, the nonhuman servants of Nihil," Harry said briskly. He didn't want to leave a chance for Hermione to explain it, because he didn't know if she would get it right or not. Sometimes he still thought she had a bias against Draco, however committed she was to working with him. "I had to persuade him, but he thought it out in the end and agreed that it was the only consistent position."

"Harry."

Draco stood behind him, and Harry knew he was angry just from the tone of his voice. He rolled his eyes at his friends and turned around, fixing his face in the most determinedly polite smile he could. "Yes?"

"They didn't need to know that." Draco was staring at both Ron and Hermione with lowered eyelids. They might make him look sleepy, but Harry knew the truth of that particular look by now. Draco was awake and ready to strike if he saw or heard something that displeased him. "Why did you tell them?"

"Because they might not trust me if I'd said that you changed your mind on your own," Harry said. "They had to hear the process."

"The less said about your _process, _the better," Ron muttered.

Draco started to open his mouth, but Harry sighed and laid his hand on Draco's arm. "He's not talking about our argument process," he said. "He's talking about the ways and times we have sex."

Draco closed his mouth again and swept Ron with an expert glance. "Perhaps you should consider not hanging advertisements for the world all over yourself first, Weasley, before you scold others for doing it."

Ron turned from pink to red and started to snap back. This time, it was Hermione who stopped him, by leaning her head on his shoulder. Ron closed his mouth and turned away, one arm around Hermione's waist. His silent stare at Draco was antagonistic, though.

"Great," Harry muttered, and tried not to bury his head in his hands. Their classmates were already looking at him with curiosity, and he didn't want to give them more room to stare or suspect a disagreement between the comitatus. "Do you _have _to do this?"

"They're the ones who distrust me, not the other way around." Draco folded his arms.

Harry waited until Draco wasn't trying to stare off into the distance, caught his eye, and then snorted very loudly, twice.

Draco had the grace to grow a little pink. "Yes, well. Perhaps it's mutual. But they're the ones who tend to start the arguments. Have you forgotten that Granger still thinks you shouldn't be dating me?"

Harry shrugged. "I don't know if she thinks that anymore. She hasn't said anything to me about it lately. The _point_, though, is that we should be able to put petty little rows like this aside by now and work with each other. Or do you want the comitatus to go into battle and then fall apart over who's going to lead?"

"_That _question has already been solved, I thought," Draco said, in what sounded like genuine surprise. "I am, of course."

Harry sighed, but he didn't get the chance to say anything, because Ketchum strode in just then, and they had to take their places in the circle around him like good little note-takers. Ketchum looked worn and tired, and Harry reckoned they weren't the only ones trying to come up with good solutions to the problems surrounding the war with Nihil and failing.

On the other hand, he no longer thought that allying with the instructors was a solution to the problem, not when the instructors had their own superiors immediately at hand to please.

_I can't believe how cynical I'm becoming, _Harry thought, and sat down next to Draco. Draco grabbed his hand and squeezed it. _I thought I had Draco to be cynical for me._

Maybe it was just another example of the way they had traded roles, though. Now Draco was the leader, instead of Harry, the way people had expected him to be all throughout the war with Voldemort. Now Harry was the one who spent time trying to persuade his friends out of unreasonable assertions, instead of trying to persuade Draco. And now Draco was the one who had lost his family, instead of Harry being the only one.

Harry squeezed back.

* * *

"Much better," Weston murmured when she passed Harry and Draco at the start of the Partnership Trust class that morning. "I can already tell that you will work better together than you have been. Because of this, we can spend more time with our hopeless cases."

Draco tried to ignore the warmth that pulsed to life beneath his breastbone. He shouldn't feel that way about a compliment from someone who had spent so much time defeating and hectoring him, trying to _force _him to change the way he fought and the way he communicated with his partner.

He felt it nevertheless.

In the middle of the expanse of mud that was their "classroom," Weston and Lowell turned to stand side-by-side, eyes narrowed as they surveyed their students. Both of them had their hands planted on their hips, their heads turning slowly from side to side as though they were counting the little sighs and fidgets and eyerolls of everyone present. Draco vowed to himself to remember that tactic. It made them intimidating without a great deal of effort. He might be able to use it later in confrontations with Granger and Weasley.

"We must find you partners," Weston said. "You will not be able to function as a fully trained Auror by yourself. For that reason, we will make the final selections today."

Draco smiled. If he had not been partnered with Harry, he would have felt anxious at the words, concerned that they would partner him with someone who matched him in level of skill but hated him personally.

But he was outside the circle now, and could watch with high glee as Granger and Weasley, the first pair summoned by Weston and Lowell, shuffled forwards, heads hanging as if they expected a scolding.

"Now," Weston said. "You are close to each other in level of skill, and your attachment to one another means that you are unlikely to work well with other students. Therefore, we are assigning you as partners."

That wasn't the outcome Draco had hoped for, but he had to admit that watching Weasley close his eyes and Granger tilt her head back in relief afforded him a secondary level of entertainment.

"You will have to work harder than most, to make sure that you concentrate on spells and not on simply being with one another," Lowell told them.

Neither Weasley nor Granger seemed to hear. Draco snorted. It was good for _them_ that they would be working with him and Harry in the comitatus. He and Harry had good combat experience as well as experience working together. They would be teachers by example for Granger and Weasley.

Lowell and Weston assigned more pairs, most of whom weren't surprising to Draco after watching them practice together in class, and none of whom were interesting, until Lowell called, "Ursula Ventus and Robin Herricks."

Draco blinked. Herricks was a quiet boy who had kept up with the exercises well enough but who had nothing like Ventus's brilliance in battle. He watched in concern as they came forwards. It might be harder to keep Ventus in the comitatus if she had a partner who insisted on tagging along with her everywhere.

Or perhaps there was a growing romantic attachment between Ventus and Herricks, and he had simply missed it. That romantic attachment seemed to be Lowell and Weston's motivation for some of the other pairs they'd assigned.

But no, as they stood side-by-side, Ventus simply looked bored. Herricks looked nervous and afraid, shifting from foot to foot and glancing over his shoulder as though he expected someone to charge up on a white horse and rescue him from this unwanted situation.

"This is the most unexpected choice we have made, I know," Weston said, voice soft as she looked at them. "You have spent little time practicing together, in part because Ventus prefers not to work with others."

"I prefer to work by myself, yes," said Ventus, sounding utterly unabashed. Draco could wish that he had her indifference to criticism.

Then he shot a sideways glance at Harry. _On the other hand, with that indifference, I might not have the best thing in my life._

Weston sighed, but Draco thought she was concealing a smile. "I believe that we have made the best choice for other reasons," she said. "Please step away from us and face each other. Herricks, cast a Shield Charm while Ventus tries to strike you with an offensive spell."

"What kind of offensive spell?" Ventus looked and sounded interested for the first time.

"It doesn't matter," Lowell said. "I think you'll spot the reason for our decision no matter which one you use."

Ventus smiled and spun her wand between her hands, studying Herricks as he stood in front of her. Draco saw that he had large, weak blue eyes, prone to watering, and despised him even more. He swallowed and glanced at the instructors. "When should I raise the Shield Charm?" he asked. "Now, or when I see the spell coming?"

"When you see the spell coming." Weston leaned back against an imaginary post, the way she had a habit of doing in some of the private training sessions with Draco and Harry. "And Ventus, cast whenever you're ready."

Herricks swallowed again. Ventus spun her wand some more, then tossed it up lightly and caught it. Draco didn't hear the spell when she cast it, and he hoped that was because she had cast nonverbally and not because he had been distracted by her wand-spinning technique, which he _knew _was a distraction.

The spell hissed, a thick stream of directed smoke that arrowed in towards Herricks's ankles. It was a spell that Draco hadn't seen before, and he wondered how well the Shield Charm would work against it. Weston and Lowell might have given Herricks bad advice by restricting him to one spell. _Well, it wouldn't be the first time. _

But the Shield Charm slammed into existence, and Draco blinked. He didn't think Harry could have done a better one. It was a thick, glowing wall, not translucent the way it usually was, and it dissipated Ventus's spell around to the sides, rather than bouncing it back the way most of those Draco had seen did.

Ventus leaned forwards on her toes to peer at the spell, then looked up at Herricks again. "You didn't tell me you could do that," she said, in a mildly accusatory tone.

"Of course I can do that." Herricks's face was much better with a shot of indignation, Draco thought, and wondered if the instructors had noticed that before now. "_Everyone _can do that, if they try."

Draco exchanged a glance with Harry, who smiled a little and shook his head. If he thought he couldn't do such a strong Shield Charm, then Draco was inclined to believe him, though also to believe that he might achieve one with a bit of practice.

"And that is the reason that we partnered you," Weston said, looking back and forth across the class as if daring anyone to disagree with her and Lowell's choice. "Ventus is good at offensive magic almost exclusively, Herricks at defensive magic almost exclusively. They will have to work together to develop their capacities to the highest degree and learn how to interact with one another, but they will be a strong team in the end."

"I'll accept him, until I see that he's falling behind," Ventus said. Lowell gave her a quelling glance, but she didn't notice, as she didn't notice most things, Draco thought. She was at least studying Herricks with an interested expression, which Lowell and Weston might realize was a triumph when it came to her.

"And I'll do the same for you," Herricks retorted, raking a hand through his hair as if pushing it out of his eyes would make him braver.

Ventus smiled amiably and took him over in a corner to practice. Draco half-closed his eyes and began to imagine how they would integrate Herricks's defensive skills into a battle.

_If he could be trusted to be Ventus's partner in everything. If we can really make him part of the comitatus. Strong skills or not, he might not agree with what we're doing._

Draco was pleased with himself. He was acknowledging that other people had their own emotions and ambitions and might not want to bow to his needs. That was being a good leader, he thought.

* * *

Harry would have found it hard to say why he'd followed Holder when he saw her striding across the camp, her face set in a grim line. After all, he'd seen her walking about the camp with orders or messages from Robards before, and never had the urge to follow.

But this time, he did.

He tried to make sure that she had no reason to glance over her shoulder by stopping to talk to Ketchum and Portillo Lopez on the way, and wandering along rather than walking purposefully like she did, his eyes on the ground. But it was wasted effort. She never looked around, even to make sure that she wasn't going to bump into someone.

_Of course, she probably doesn't need to worry about that when everyone gets out of her way anyway, _Harry thought, as he cast a Disillusionment Charm over himself and settled near the flap of Robards's tent. He wasn't going to cast any eavesdropping charms, which they probably had wards to detect; he just thought he'd overhear anything he could from simply listening.

"I have the list that you requested, sir." Holder's voice was almost polite. Harry heard the rustle of parchment. "Very few of the trainee pairs will be ready to face Nihil by the end of this season. I would say none, but there are exceptions, such as Potter and Malfoy."

Harry stared in blank amazement, although he couldn't see anything through the flap without moving his head, which he didn't want to do in case they heard something. _She's complimenting us? And she didn't immediately fall dead of the effort?_

"Their readiness for this war is not the only consideration," Robards said. "How many of the current trainee pairs will be ready for work as full-time Aurors after the war's end?"

"More," Holder said. "But they and the battle-ready pairs do not overlap. Sir, if you follow my advice, you'll cast Potter and Malfoy out of the trainee program at the end of the war. They're too independent. They won't follow orders or correct procedure. They might be the saving of us all from Nihil, but they'll use excessive force with ordinary Dark wizards when they have to arrest them, and never see anything wrong with it."

Harry rolled his eyes. _Oh, yes, I see. She compliments us, but only so she can follow it up with a complaint a moment later._

Still, he was a bit shaken to think that Holder believed he and Draco might save them all. He wasn't sure it was a responsibility he wanted, of course, but Holder and Robards wouldn't care about that.

"We will see what must come of it, Alice," Robards said, with a snap in his voice that Harry recognized. Dumbledore had sounded the same way with McGonagall sometimes, or McGonagall with Snape.

"Of course, sir," Holder said, with no sign that she was subdued. "But I am making a list of Potter and Malfoy's strengths and deficiencies to present to you soon. I trust that you will read it?"

"Yes."

That seemed to be all the answer Holder required, because she came out of the flap of the tent a moment later. Harry stifled his instinct to scramble away immediately; Ketchum had taught them that panicked retreat on the battlefield or when in hiding was one sure way to get the enemy to hear you. Harry _knew _he was enough out of the way that Holder wouldn't trip over the corner of his cloak.

Nor did she. She went on her way, still looking neither to right nor to left, one hand on her hip and face settled in an abstract frown.

Harry let out a slow breath and then went to find Draco, who with all luck should be in their tent.

Of _course _this turned out to be the one time when he wasn't. Harry hesitated in the flap, then turned and headed for the small tent where they were keeping Nusquam.

* * *

"I don't understand why you _can't _use this Legilimency to read Nihil's mind through his servant."

Draco sighed and resisted the temptation to press his hand over his eyes. He wanted to explain that the answer to Gregory's question wasn't as simple as she thought it was, but the problem was, he would still have to simplify it a _little_, and he didn't know how he was going to do that.

"Because," he said, with what he thought was iron patience, "Nihil's mind isn't human. His constructs' minds are closer to it, if only because they have human bodies and he'd need them to be able to act and look normal in various situations, not just like part of him. But we can't reach out through them to him without entering a realm where he would be in control. We tried it once, Harry and I. Harry nearly died."

"But you used a spell, you said." Gregory was staring at Nusquam, as she had been since they entered the tent. She never even looked away from her to argue with Draco. "This time, you have a stronger link."

Draco shook his head. "I won't try it. The risk is too great."

"Then how can you wonder that we have so little information?" Gregory moved her fingers as though dismissing what Draco had gathered so far, about the means of transportation past the wards and the specific rituals with Catherine Arrowshot that Nusquam had been involved in. "We need more than this."

"And we'll get it when we've refined and developed our torture techniques," Draco said, choosing the topic as one he thought likely to distract her.

Gregory smiled. "Yes. There is something else that I wanted to try." She faced Nusquam, who was looking down at the floor of the tent as though the patterns in the mud and drifted snow would tell her how to escape. She raised her wand.

Nusquam shook her head. "This will end," she said in a weary voice. "You cannot continue to torture me forever. Sooner or later he will claim me back and destroy me."

"How will he do that?" Draco asked, thinking it would do no harm to speak the question. "Reabsorb you? Will you ever come out again?"

Nusquam's expression was still pure hatred during the moments when she forgot herself. Then again, Draco thought, she seemed more afraid of Gregory than of him. He wondered if he ought to take that as an insult or a compliment. "You understand nothing about the transformation that we have gone through."

Draco tucked away the word _transformation _in the back of his mind to think about later, and smiled temperately at her. "I don't see why we can't discover it for ourselves. It was an accident that Nihil became what he did. He wasn't a great magical genius who discovered this because of his experiments."

Gregory was holding still, he noticed. At least she was wise enough to look past her obsession with pain and realize when Nusquam was giving him useful information.

"You have _no _idea what he is," Nusquam spat. "Your lover found part of the truth, but there is so much more than that."

"I don't think there is," Draco said. "Why should there be? You go behind death. You go beyond and through it, in the way that Harry described so graphically when I asked him about it. There's no reason that we can't understand and duplicate that by drawing on Harry's memories of it. In fact," he added, seeing no reason why he shouldn't lie to an enemy, "that's what Harry is working on at the moment."

Nusquam's eyes widened, and she sat very still for a moment. Gregory crept forwards, eyes focused on her throat as if she were going to try a strangling spell.

Then Nusquam threw her head back, ignoring the pressure of the bonds above her throat that cut off her breath when she did so, and bellowed, "_Master!_"

The air and the ground thrummed. The tent twisted sideways. Draco reached down and locked his hands in the mud, even as he shut his eyes and felt the spinning stop. It was purely a sense phenomenon, then, something happening in and through their heads rather than in the physical world around them.

Gregory didn't seem to know that, and cast a curse. Draco didn't hear it strike anything. But the tent was full of wild, roaring noises now, and he was listening desperately, trying to tell the real from the false, trying to sort out what was happening.

And then—

Then cold washed the tent, and Draco had to open his eyes because he wanted to see what was happening in front of him.

Nusquam still sat before them in bonds, but her face was gone. In its place hovered the sickly yellow mask of glamours that Draco had seen Nihil use before when he wanted to appear in person.

"If you wish to know what it is like to transform," he whispered, "you are welcome."

And an invisible arm lashed out, caught Draco, and dragged him into cold and darkness.


	8. Behind Death

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Eight—Behind Death_

Harry felt a cold wind blow around him when he was still some distance from the tent that housed Nusquam. It tugged at his hair and made him feel, briefly, as if someone held the point of a knife to his neck. Then it hurried past him and flung itself into the camp. Harry heard the walls of canvas ripple and rustle, and the noise of ropes cracking.

It was only a bit of wind. There was no reason it should have made him start running as if his feet were on fire.

But it did, and at the same moment, he felt that sharp prickling sensation in his right shoulder that Draco had described when Harry was in danger. Harry fell on his knees before the small tent flap and crawled breathlessly inside, trying to watch everything at once so he would have a chance of knowing what was happening.

Draco sat on the floor in an awkward position, one hand extended and eyes utterly still. Harry knew he wasn't unconscious, or his head would have fallen forwards, but he didn't know what was wrong.

A tendril of thick darkness extended out from Nusquam to touch him. Nusquam was still in bonds, but her face wasn't her own, and Harry thought that was all that was needed to put Draco in danger. He could only see a swimming golden whirlwind where her face had been, in fact, and although it didn't focus on him at the moment, a shiver went down his spine anyway.

Gregory was dancing about, screaming wordlessly and hurling curses Harry had never seen before. All of them stopped a few feet away from Nusquam, or Nihil, or whatever combination of the two it was now, as if they'd hit an invisible Shield Charm. Harry nodded. He wouldn't waste time trying to reach them by conventional means, then.

He dropped to one knee behind Draco and reached up to clasp his shoulders. Draco's skin was freezing beneath his touch, so stiff that it burned his fingers. Harry gritted his teeth and managed to ignore that. He _had _to hang on. He had no idea why, because he didn't have much of a defensive strategy, but he knew that much.

The mask of Nihil/Nusquam focused on him then. Harry saw a brief glimpse of what might have been white teeth, and another dark arm lashed out of the bound figure, traveling straight towards him. Its end was curved, Harry saw, and had suckers on the end like an octopus's tentacle.

He lowered his head and bit savagely at his arm, tearing his head sideways so that a bloody wound opened up. The blood dripped down his elbow but didn't reach the ground before the tendril hit him. Harry would have to hope that the mere use of the blood was enough, and that it didn't matter whether it hit the ground or formed into a ring.

The coldness and darkness surrounded him, but Harry kept his concentration on the colder skin of Draco's shoulders for a moment, and—

He didn't know how to describe it, afterwards. He knew what it felt like, and that was all.

He reached out and lashed his magic _through _the blood, and the coldness, and all the sensations that he was feeling at that small, tiny point in time. He knew the right directions because he could feel. He could feel Draco, and the blood dripping warmly down his arm, and the aching pain of the wound. He channeled his magic through it the way he would channel it through a wand, and then screamed a challenge into the mouth of the tunnel that he could feel gaping to swallow him.

"_Attack!_"

The word was in Parseltongue; he was already thinking about the image of a snake, holding it firmly in his mind, the same great cobra with a spread hood that he had used to defend himself from the shadow of Lucius Malfoy.

The darkness boiled in front of him, and suddenly he could see the snake. Harry hadn't realized how much he was missing color until he saw it just then. This was dark green, with here and there flecks of dark blue, and black where the hood had cobra markings. Harry blinked. He hadn't realized that he had envisioned it so clearly, or that he would see it this way. Where had the blue come from?

The cobra's head swung to face him, and Harry realized, with a start, that he should stop thinking about stupid things like that. He gestured forwards with his head, or what he thought was his head, and hissed the command again. "_Find the one who is trying to hurt me and my mate._" This wasn't the time to worry about what kind of word for Draco the Parseltongue would find. "_Kill him._"

The cobra slithered away into the dark. Harry clamped his fingers down on Draco's shoulders again and began to tug, trying to think of some way he could move Draco spiritually as well as physically out of the trap.

Only when the darkness glittered again, this time with small, brown-gold, fast-moving snakes, did he realize that he already had an idea.

* * *

Draco was locked in a freezing vault, and he was learning despair.

The lessons pounded home each time with the crack of huge icicles being driven into his body. He was pinned and stretched out on the wall of a glacier, and Nihil's voice laughed in his ears. Draco lost the memory of a loving embrace as he lay there, and the taste of honey, and the sight of a sunrise.

He could still remember the words. They were still in his mind. Nihil couldn't take that from him—at least, not yet. But no image came to him when he stretched his memory after them, and less sensation.

_You will learn all the lessons that I did, _Nihil's voice told him, and Draco hated that he clung to the words, because at least they were something that he could hear, something different from the endless darkness and silence and cold.

The chains holding him broke apart. Now he drifted, and was drawn by a powerful current towards something that brushed him with rough, sharp edges. Draco thought he was bleeding, and then realized that he had no idea if living concepts like that applied here. He floated and tumbled, and the stream slammed him against more edges and then began to push knowledge into his head.

_In the moment when Nihil had become what he now was, as the souls and bodies and magic of two brothers blended, driven by the intense wish to escape pain, he had learned what lay behind death._

The words ripped and tore at Draco. The words weren't the means of their delivery; these weren't things Nihil was _saying. _It was, rather, the way that Draco's mind chose to process the information. He struggled again to escape, and could find nothing, no way to fight, no way to flee the consuming grip. He was in nothing.

_Behind death lay stillness, and there lay change. That was the great mistake of the necromancers and the others who knew nothing about death except the common superstitions that they had learned from questioning captured necromancers. They thought of death as the realm of permanence and life as the realm of change. But death did change, by slow and incomprehensible ticks, the way that an insect in amber might not realize it was in amber and go on moving, limb by slow limb._

Draco sobbed. His head felt near to bursting, and still the information fell on top of him like cold sand and forced its way through his ears. He wondered if he would die before the end. He wondered what he looked like right now.

_Nihil had learned that transformation, and how to master it. Nihil _was _that transformation, drawn out of the corners of death, gathered in one place, and given a will and a purpose. He could transform his spirits and his lives in ways unknown to the living. He did not grow or decay or slide into uselessness the way that the changes of the living did. He was simply and subtly what he always wanted to be, and resistance to him was weak because the others had to work through clumsy materials, while Nihil dwelt solely and simply in a realm of will. He was the voice of the dead, the will of the dead as they had always wanted to be._

Draco thought he would die if he had to take much more of this, this relentless crushing and pounding. Or he would simply turn into powder and become one of Nihil's servants and weapons. He could see how it happened now. Aran had probably resisted; Dearborn might have tried to keep some sense of a separate identity. But that grinding maw took them in, and when they came out again, they'd been digested.

_This was how to move. This was how to change. Nihil would teach him, and he would no longer be what he had been, a spirit in a body. He would be the changes of death locked in a body that he need no longer fear to leave, because it would never decay—_

Something heavy struck him. Draco opened his eyes and stared into the darkness, wondering whether it would be worthwhile to cry out, because this sensation was at least different from the ones that he had experienced so far.

The blow came again. Draco turned his head—and it did seem that he had a head again, after long moments of being an aching, useless set of separated pieces in the dark. He could feel that the blow was coming from the side, while the cold and the pounding of Nihil's teeth had seemed to come from straight ahead.

"Help!" he called, just in case.

The blow came again, and then the darkness tore into light and color, and a swarm of snakes moving over him.

Draco tried not to tense and throw the snakes off. He didn't think they were here to hurt him. In fact, remembering that Harry could speak to snakes and use them as illusions in his spells, he was virtually certain that they weren't.

A snarl seemed to roll all around him, or perhaps it was only a dense vibration of the kind that Draco imagined he would hear if he was inside a mouth when it snarled. Nihil's teeth began to draw him in again. Draco struggled and opened his arms to the snakes. If his own will could make a difference in this contest, he would give it to them and gladly.

He did think that he saw another snake shoot past overhead, something glowing green and blue and black. He hoped that it was attacking Nihil, since it pushed straight into the maw trying to devour him and didn't come back.

For a moment, Draco reflected, in humiliation, that he wasn't going to get the chance to matter or be powerful this time.

Then he smiled, and began to fight even harder, hoping that he was distracting Nihil from the war he had with Harry. He did have something to offer, something different and valuable, if he could get out of Nihil's trap alive.

He knew what Nihil saw in death, what he could do there, what the source of his power was. Probably no one else had ever come this far and then managed to escape; they had been transformed into part of Nihil instead. Draco might not have the magic to fight Nihil, but he had the knowledge.

He lunged against his bonds, and felt the ice gripping him hesitate and draw back, lessening. Immediately he sat up and flung himself along with the retreating swarm of snakes in the direction of light.

Or, at least, in the direction that was the opposite of Nihil. Draco wouldn't mind if he found out that it was full of darkness, as long as it was a different _kind _of darkness from the one that was eating him.

* * *

Harry had no idea what he was doing, but that had never stopped him before. He hadn't been sure how his death would defeat Voldemort, either, since if he had died that would have got rid of the Horcrux but not killed him.

But he had walked into the Forbidden Forest and stood in front of Voldemort to receive the Killing Curse anyway, and now he was pouring himself into the battle with Nihil the same way.

The brown snakes danced around Draco, and where they danced, the darkness pulled back. Harry _still _wasn't sure what it was about his magic that Nihil couldn't stand. If Portillo Lopez was right and there was a combination of life and death in his magic, presumably Nihil couldn't bear the life part.

And the cobra sank its fangs into the darkness and thrashed back and forth, shaking it to pieces, swallowing the cold that Nihil tried to feed it and dissipating it. The cobra wasn't real, only an illusion supercharged by Harry's imagination and blood, and it couldn't be hurt in the same way that a living creature swallowing that darkness would.

Nihil screamed. Harry shuddered as the ripples passed his ears, and then decided that he didn't have to care about the sound. He was going to rescue Draco and hurt Nihil badly enough to convince him to retreat. Everything else could wait.

The brown snakes were pulling Draco with them now. It was easier, and Harry didn't know why. Perhaps Draco had figured out they were friends and wasn't fighting them, which he thought would have made everything harder.

The cobra bit and drank and swallowed, and still Nihil lashed at it ineffectually. Harry wondered if Nihil _could _actually learn how to fight a creature that combined life and death magic, and hoped not.

_I know you._

The icy voice spoke from within his head, rather than brushing past it on the outside as the shriek had. Harry shivered, but continued to pour the magic into his blood and his illusions and concentrate on his battles.

_I know that you are not different from me. I know that you took up necromancy because you wanted the dead to return. _The voice altered, dipping down and growing softer, so that it sounded like the voices Harry had sometimes used to argue with himself about necromancy in the depths of the night. _Have you forgotten the duty you owe to them?_

Harry gritted his teeth. Yes, the temptation was still there, beating like a pulse beneath the surface of his mind, but he knew where his duty lay, with the living.

_I wanted to rescue the living, too. I became what I am because I wanted to rescue my brother. I suffered at the hands of Death Eaters, like you. Why are we so different? Look me in the eye, and I could tell you what I am. Perhaps you would find sympathy in me. Perhaps we would come to understand each other._

Harry focused on Draco. He thought Draco was almost to him, wherever that was. The small brown snakes were losing some of their strength as they got closer, because Harry had only created them to find Draco, and their work was almost done.

_Would the dead want you to give up the chance to summon them back to life? Sirius Black's life was cut short, and he would want to live. Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks…wouldn't it be right for them to return and live out their lives as parents of their child? I can do nothing about their natural deaths in time, but these were unnatural. Come, let me summon them. I know where their spirits must rest._

"You can't do that," Harry muttered between clenched teeth, and then wanted to tell himself off for listening to Nihil. He had to pull. He had to bite. He had to be ready to draw the snake illusions back into himself and disengage from the battle, though he wasn't at all sure how he would do that.

_Yes, I can. _Nihil's voice was almost gentle now. _I own this sea. I swim in it as you swim in the sea of life, all unconscious, unknowing of what you do. But I am a double-sided creature, and I know._

The darkness flickered in front of Harry, and he saw the faces of the spirits as he had seen them waiting on the other side in the one pure necromantic ritual he had ever performed. Sirius was leaning forwards, his eyes yearning, the way Harry imagined he must have looked when he was breaking out of Azkaban. Remus and Tonks leaned on each other, robes blowing around them in an unnatural wind. Fred wasn't far behind them, giving Harry an uncertain smile and mouthing words that Harry turned his head away from.

_You would disdain them? _Nihil's voice dripped with sugary disappointment. _Then I am sure that you will not care if I do this._

Whips lunged down from above and slammed into Remus and Tonks, driving them to their knees. A hot knife scraped the skin from Sirius's back. Fred was twisted as though someone had him in two giant hands, and Harry saw his head pop from his shoulders.

Harry bit his tongue. Blood was running down his chin, and he focused through it, reaching out to Draco again with pure magic.

_I chose the living._

Nihil's voice said something in his ears, faint and far away, but Harry didn't listen to it. He had hold of Draco now, with snakes and with spirit, and was pulling on him so hard that he thought he might have been able to reel him in even if Draco was resisting.

The cold wind flickered around his hair and ears, the way it had when he first approached the tent. Nihil snarled, and Harry felt it reverberate through his bones. His vision danced with the images of the dead.

_I will not forget this, _Nihil said.

"I thought you never forgot anything," Harry gasped, and the words were no sooner out of his mouth than he felt Nihil's hold on Draco loosen. Draco practically slammed into him, and his snakes faded, and together they fell out of the darkness that Nihil had drawn Draco into.

One more time, coldness touched Harry's ears like snowflakes, and Nihil whispered, _I have thought, and studied. And I have decided. You will be destroyed in the same way as all the others who stand to oppose me._

Harry would have liked to say that he'd never expected any special treatment, but they were back in light, and Gregory was kneeling over them demanding an explanation. Harry opened his eyes and saw Nusquam sagging forwards in her bonds. He couldn't see her face and didn't know if she was still physically present or not, but he didn't see that it mattered as long as she wasn't moving.

Draco, and Gregory, were the more pressing concerns to deal with.

* * *

Of all the sensations Draco had missed, the greatest was warmth.

He huddled against Harry's body, listening to his heartbeat and the way he shivered and sighed when he spoke to Gregory. He was grateful that Harry's hand never ceased stroking his hair, and that Harry seemed to know instinctively that Draco needed his heat, because he never moved away, either.

Draco imagined that they made an undignified picture, sprawled on the floor of the tent, draped over each other as though Gregory had caught them in the act of making love. For once, he didn't care, _couldn't _care. He tightened his grip on Harry's arm, and Harry squeezed his hand once and then went back to answering questions. Draco reckoned he should listen to the questions and try to comprehend how they related to him. He was past the first moments of needing extreme comfort now.

"I want you to tell me what you _did_," said Gregory. Draco smiled in spite of himself. That was Gregory, requiring information so that she could duplicate or at least understand every action that someone else took.

"It's hard to describe," Harry said tiredly. "You know that I've been working with Portillo Lopez. She's discovered that my magic, the magic that I use when I'm supposedly performing necromancy, is a mixture of the forces of life and death. Nihil could take control of me or fight me easily if I only used one or the other, but not both. I used my blood and the illusions of snakes, which respond to Parseltongue, to reach after Draco and to bring him back." His hands tightened on Draco's shoulders. Draco tilted his head so that his brow rested against Harry's chest. He understood all the things he knew Harry would find it difficult to put into words.

"Back," said Gregory, as though that innocent word was the key to fighting Nihil and Harry was wrong to hide it from her. "Where did he go? I could see his body kneeling here all the time you supposedly fought for him."

"Where do you go when you dream?" Harry snapped, and Draco would have liked to applaud the retort, if only his arms weren't so tired. "It was a place like that. In mind, in imagination, or something more. I know that I stopped Nihil from consuming Draco and stopped him from taking my mind over. That's all I care about right now."

Draco thought that the right place to clear his throat and join the conversation. "We have something more," he said.

"Oh, thank God you're still sane," Harry said, in a rush of emotion dense enough that Draco wasn't surprised it made his voice thick, and then bowed his head. Draco felt more than one drop of salt water on his face. He found Harry's hand and squeezed it back. He would have to do something nice for Harry—for them both—after Gregory was done interrogating them. And he thought he knew what, though it would require him to rest first.

"Yes, I am," Draco said. "More than that. Nihil told me certain things about what it was like to be behind death, and what he was, and I escaped with them. I can't imagine that's common."

"What is he?" Gregory switched her targets in a moment, from Harry to him. Draco twisted around to face her, glad that his shivering body remained in contact with Harry. He honestly didn't think he could stand on his own right now.

"Something that controls the change behind death," Draco said. "Portillo Lopez had told us that change separated life and death, that death is made of stillness and life of growth. But apparently there's a different kind of transformation that Nihil exploits when he moves spirits from body to body or creates new people from himself, like Nusquam. He told me it was like the movement an insect might experience in amber."

"But insects in amber don't move." Gregory frowned at him as if she thought he was trying to make a fool of her.

"No one can survive death the way Nihil can, either," Draco snapped. "It's a paradox, and we'll have to treat it that way and use it for what we can, rather than rejecting it because it can't exist."

Gregory paused, then, to Draco's utter surprise, dipped her head to him. "You are right," she said. "I apologize."

Draco would have gaped at Harry, inviting him to share his surprise, if they were alone. As it was, Harry seemed to take the apology for a break in the interrogation, and curled his arms around Draco, helping him to his feet. "We're going back to our tent now," he said firmly, "to sleep through the rest of our evening."

Gregory smiled. "I don't blame you. I shall secure Nusquam, if she lives."

As they left the tent, Draco realized that he didn't care at all if Nusquam was still alive. Perhaps he should be bothered by that, but considering she'd never been properly alive in the first place, he wasn't.

"Are you really all right?" Harry whispered as they limped and staggered along. "Draco, I was so worried—"

Draco raised his head, gripped Harry's chin, and kissed him by way of response. He made sure to use his tongue as much as he could when he was this exhausted, to lick the back of Harry's teeth and to bite at his lips. When he pulled back, Harry looked pleasantly dazed.

"Yes, I'm well," Draco whispered. "Simply tired. Thank you."

Harry kissed him behind the ear and helped him the rest of the way to their tent, where they fell into bed together. Draco had planned to remain awake and spin a few devious plots to ensure Harry got all the rewards he deserved.

He managed about half of one before he fell asleep.


	9. Waking to the Light

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Nine—Waking to the Light_

Harry opened his eyes slowly. He had the impression that the room was flooded with light he couldn't see. He turned his head, trying to make out both where it was coming from and what had woken him up.

Draco was crouching over him, he realized, and thus blocked all the light from the flap of the tent but a narrow corona. His soft breathing over Harry's ear would probably have been enough to wake him, since Harry could feel his skin tingling in the wash of it.

"Hey," Harry said sleepily.

Draco smiled, but didn't respond—at least, verbally. He bowed his head and caught Harry's lips in a slow, smooth kiss that Harry found himself opening his mouth to before he'd even checked to see if the proper privacy wards were up on the tent.

Draco kissed him as though he was starving for a taste and trying to make it last at the same time. He'd planted one hand heavily on Harry's chest, which kept him pinned to the bed even when Harry tried to move forwards. Draco's tongue stroked the insides of Harry's cheeks slowly, languidly. His other hand clutched Harry's hip, and now and then he shifted so that their erections could rub together.

Harry shivered. He would have liked nothing better right then than to roll Draco over, pin him to the bed in turn, and rub them both into oblivion.

But he could tell already that Draco had something different in mind, and he had to admit, he was curious to see what it was.

Draco pulled away from his mouth and sat up across Harry's hips, giving him an intense look that destroyed most of Harry's warm contentment from the kiss. Draco only looked at him like that when he was going to criticize him for something. Harry shifted, wondering if he should try to get out from under Draco so that they would at least be on the same level.

He'd have a hard time doing it, though. Draco was using his weight to keep Harry completely flat, and Harry knew he'd fight back if Harry tried to flip him off. So he lay and waited for the scrutiny to end.

"I want to try something," Draco said suddenly. They were so different from the words Harry had _expected _him to speak that he blinked and stared. Draco didn't seem to notice, sucking on his bottom lip and regarding Harry with a careful gaze. "Do you trust me enough to let me do it?"

Harry licked his lips. "Well, that depends. Anything that's connected to sex and the way you handle my body, sure. Dentistry without training, probably not."

Draco laughed without sound and bent down to kiss Harry again. Harry's head spun as he drifted into the kiss. Draco could snog longer without pausing to take a breath than anyone Harry had ever known.

"It's _definitely _sex," Draco said, and pulled back from Harry's mouth, though he kept his tongue extended so that he could trace the current shape of Harry's raised, begging tongue before he kept speaking. "Just different from what we've done before."

Harry nodded and tried to look encouraging. He probably could hardly look _more _encouraging, because Draco chuckled again and pulled back the robes from last night that Harry still wore, beginning to kiss down his chest.

_I probably smell bad, _Harry thought, and reached for his wand on the bedside table, intending to cast a Cleaning Charm so that Draco at least wouldn't have to mouth sweaty skin.

Draco reached out and seized his wrist without looking up from his task. "What are you doing?" he murmured, and then sunk his teeth into Harry's nipple and tugged.

It took Harry about ten seconds to recover from that, by which time Draco had moved on to the other nipple, and he had to recover from _that_. "Was just…going to clean myself up a bit," he gasped.

"I want you the way you are right now," Draco said softly, nipping and then blowing on Harry's skin above his groin so that it felt more sensitive. Harry shivered and wondered if he looked like the moron he feared he looked like for shivering from such a slight thing. But Draco's eyes were dark with seriousness as he stared at Harry's face, and he didn't seem to have noticed Harry shaking. "The way you were when you saved my life and sanity."

"Um." Harry felt his face heat up. "I was a little more alert and crazy with fear then."

Draco laughed yet again. "Then say I want you the way you are now," he said, tugging Harry's hips up and rubbing his cheek against Harry's cock. "That will do."

Harry would have asked why, but Draco kept _touching _him every time he wanted to ask a question, and that wasn't fair. No one could have been expected to form words under the circumstances, Harry was sure.

He didn't say anything about that, though, because Draco might suggest a comparison between Harry and other people he had touched, and the very thought made Harry boil with shallow and totally justified jealousy.

Draco seemed to bite and kiss at least half of the skin on Harry's chest before he tugged on his trousers. Harry raised his hips, and Draco pushed the trousers and then his pants down to his ankles before Harry could panic. He also slid his mouth around Harry's cock without so much as an invitation and _sucked_.

Harry gasped, thrust once before he remembered that he was ramming his cock down Draco's throat and tried to hold still, and decided that the next time Draco wanted to do something like that, he could just go ahead and do it. Even if they were in the middle of class, it would probably be all right.

"Push if you want to," Draco said, withdrawing his mouth long enough to speak and swirl his tongue around the head of Harry's cock, and then he sank down again and Harry had never felt anything like this, even the other times that Draco sucked him off before, because it was so _intense._

_Apparently some of the time when he stares at me like he's going to criticize me, he's really planning to suck me until my stomach hurts with pleasure, _Harry thought, writhing on the blankets and trying to hold open his legs and thrust and not-thrust and avoid bumping Draco's chin with his knee all at the same time. _I'll remember that._

He passed from thought into pure sensation and then back again, rocking back and forth so regularly that he couldn't catch his breath, couldn't be ready for it, couldn't stop. He stared at Draco's head bobbing between his legs and occasionally caught his eye. Draco wasn't smiling. He enjoyed what he was doing, Harry thought, but he also took it seriously, and that meant he wasn't going to stop for the sake of something as petty as a smile.

Harry finally closed his eyes and surrendered to the last pulsing moments before his orgasm, pushing at Draco's cheek so that he would get the signal. Draco didn't seem to understand, since he never varied the pace or speed of his sucking. Harry practically pushed at Draco's head, and only got an annoyed look for his efforts. Then Draco clamped his lips down and seemed to blow a new blast of superheated air all down Harry's skin.

The world turned around, briefly, the way it had when Harry went after Draco, but this time light and fiery sensation were behind it instead of cold and darkness. Harry shuddered, made a noise that could best be described as, "_Aurguh_," and came hard enough to make his head hurt.

Draco pulled back in the wake of that. He licked his lips and the sound seemed loud in the silence. Harry blinked at him stupidly and reached out a shaking hand. Draco let Harry touch his hair this time, though his eyes remained as focused as ever and he still didn't smile.

"Give me a minute," Harry muttered. "That was amazing and fantastic and I want to do the same to you, but it'll take me a minute to get my strength back."

"You don't need to do anything to please me but lie there if you don't wish," Draco murmured, and reached back between Harry's legs, fingers dancing lightly across his arse.

Harry froze, then blinked, then smiled, and then decided that he should probably collect the thoughts rolling around in his head at some point and said, "That's what you meant when you said that you wanted to do something we'd never done before. Not the blowjob, but—that."

"Yes, 'that,'" Draco said, raising his eyebrows as though he didn't know why Harry couldn't call it fucking. "Are you ready for this?"

Harry licked his lips and tried to think about what it would be like to have Draco inside him when he was this intense. If Draco sucking his cock while this intense had been wonderful…

"Yeah," he said, and then cleared his throat and repeated himself, because the faintness of his voice made him sound uncertain. "Yeah, I am. Come on. What are _you_ waiting for?"

* * *

Draco smiled. Harry was trying to act as though he was the one whose idea this had been, now, but nothing could hide the way his eyes darted to Draco's face and then off to the side, or the flush on his face—there already, but deepening to the point that it looked dangerous—when Draco whispered for him to spread his legs.

Draco wondered what he would say if he knew that Draco had no intention of teasing him about his reactions. He had certainly felt enough insane things when he approached Harry in Malfoy Manor. Harry couldn't feel anything more embarrassing than _he _had, and Draco wasn't one to tease when the other person knew his vulnerabilities and could use them against him.

_Or maybe I'm not one to tease Harry at all, _he thought, rubbing soothing circles around Harry's knees while he drizzled the lubricant onto his fingers.

He had decided to use the slightly oily, slick potion that he sometimes massaged into his skin to make it clearer. It wouldn't hurt Harry, at the least, and there was nothing else in the tent that would serve in a pinch. Draco wasn't going to secure Harry's agreement to this and then back off and make him wait while they located something else that would make this comfortable for them both.

Apart from anything else, Draco's cock throbbed regularly between his legs, and he wasn't sure that _he _could wait that long.

Harry made no objection when Draco showed him what they were using, though he furrowed his brow and bit his lip in the way he did when he was trying to conceal worry. Draco watched him steadily as he pushed the first finger in. He'd propped Harry's arse up with pillows and waited until his breathing calmed down, but this was inevitably going to hurt. He just hoped it was the kind of pain Harry could bear.

Harry drew in his breath and held it. Draco shook his head and clucked his tongue, though he never stopped sliding his finger in and out.

"That'll make it hurt more," he said. "Try to relax as much as you can and keep up a regular pattern of breathing. That'll make it better for both of us."

Harry worked one screwed-shut eye open and stared at him incredulously. "Better for _you_? Who's getting fucked, here?"

"Who's doing the work?" Draco retorted, and massaged with his finger, frowning when he felt Harry clamp down tighter than ever. "Besides, it's not as though I sit around rubbing my hands in delight when I come up with a new way to hurt you."

Harry licked his lips, nodded, and let his head fall back onto the pillows as he relaxed in an ostentatious fashion, heaving his breath out. Draco rolled his eyes, since he was certain that Harry couldn't see him from this angle. That hadn't been precisely what he _meant_.

Still, it allowed his finger more passage, and he added a second one without Harry noticing. Harry appeared caught up in a steady, consciously controlled pattern of breathing that he might have learned from Portillo Lopez. As long as it worked for him, Draco wasn't going to question it, though he thought Harry was more nervous than was flattering.

_On the other hand, maybe I can take it as flattering to the size of my cock. _When Harry had his eyes open, he kept glancing down, as though he could spot Draco's erection from this angle and know how much it would hurt him by virtue of seeing it.

Draco's wrist was getting tired before he nudged Harry's prostate and Harry yelped in response. Draco smiled and redoubled his probing, then winced as his cock rubbed against the sheets. It was getting to the point where the pounding of his blood hurt.

Harry seemed to know that. He glanced up, met Draco's eyes, and nodded, grabbing his legs to lift them out of the way. His face flushed more as he did so, but he never hesitated or slowed down.

Draco bent to kiss him. Courage like this amazed and humbled him, and deserved a snog at the very least.

"It'll be all right, you'll see," he whispered, and then settled down between Harry's legs and arranged them around his hips.

Harry shut his eyes, nodded, and then said, "What are you waiting for? Get on with the fucking."

He was probably just saying the words to cover his nerves, Draco thought, but he was going to take advantage of the invitation. He was getting dizzy from lust and need and what was probably the tension of going too long without an orgasm while watching Harry explode from his. He pressed slowly forwards and in.

Harry hissed like a teakettle. Draco glanced up, but Harry gave him another glare and a wriggle of his hips, so Draco decided that he could trust him to know what he wanted. A second shove, and he had to close his eyes and pant as hard as though he was the one being penetrated.

He felt his lips move without his permission, and became aware that he was _babbling. _Horrified, Draco managed to focus on his words and heard them, exactly the kinds of meaningless phrases that he had always thought he would be above saying in sex. It had certainly never happened before.

"Yes, so good, _um_, feels so good! Warm, God yeah, I love this, love fucking you, love you, love…"

Draco bit his tongue in an effort to make himself shut up, and heard Harry chuckle. When he looked again, he saw Harry smiling at him, reaching up with one hand as if he was going to cup Draco's cheek, though the angle was wrong for it.

"It's fine," he said. "You can talk like that all you like."

Draco dipped his head in a shallow nod and shoved forwards again. At least he knew that he could trust Harry not to use the stupid things he did against him, he reminded himself again. And the tightness and heat around him really did feel great enough—almost—to honor with mumblings like that.

He slipped his hands around Harry's hips and thighs, found a secure grip once, and felt it slip away again with the sweat and the way his hands shook. He swore. Harry laughed at him in response, and then suddenly gripped the sheets and pressed himself down and up at the same time, or so it seemed to Draco.

He thought of that later, though. At the moment, he was rather more preoccupied with the fact that Harry had just shoved himself firmly onto Draco's cock.

Draco felt his mouth droop open. He bowed his head and whimpered, his own muscles spasming. Harry was grunting as though his were doing the same thing, but he only grabbed Draco's hand when Draco reached out tentatively and squeezed it hard enough to crush his fingers. He didn't speak a single word or make an audible sound of pain other than the grunts. If that was the way he wanted to handle it, Draco thought, then they would.

He pulled back, and thrust forwards, and then finally forced his eyes open and dared to look down.

Harry's face was twisted to the point that Draco couldn't make out which emotion was dominant, pain or pleasure. His free hand had grabbed the pillow and contorted it the way he probably wouldn't let himself contort Draco's fingers. His breathing would probably be audible outside the tent, Draco thought, if not for the Silencing Charms, and he turned his head back and forth, seeking some consolation Draco couldn't offer.

"All right there?" Draco whispered.

"If I wasn't, would I have fucking pushed myself down on you?" Harry snapped, and opened his eyes. Draco shivered. Harry had never stared at him that way, as if he loved and hated Draco both at once. He wanted to see a lot more of it. He thrust involuntarily, and Harry laughed and lifted his hips in approval.

"You promised me a fuck," he said.

"Do you think that fucks have to be quick and rough to be worth anything?" Draco muttered, but did begin shoving and thrusting with more force. It was hardly difficult. It felt like the most glorious thing in the world, in fact, and the only thing that held him back was the fear that he might be enjoying it more than Harry was.

"Yes," Harry said, and lifted his hips and squeezed down with his muscles as if he assumed that the experience needed to be _better _for Draco than it already was. "That's practically in the word, don't you think? That short little vowel sound and the way it ends, like someone spat it out. _Fuck_ me like that."

Draco couldn't have held out against an entreaty like that if he'd had a lot more patience and experience. He was vulnerable to it like nothing else when his body was already throbbing with eagerness. He shuddered, bowed his head, and gave Harry as many thrusts as he could in a minute, sloppy and uncoordinated, but hard.

Harry moaned and continued squeezing down on Draco's cock or moving his hips in response or grabbing Draco's arse at irregular intervals. The gaze of his eyes never varied; Draco didn't catch him blinking even once. He stared at Draco as if he knew every thought that was passing through his mind and forgot and forgave them the minute the next one came along.

Very soon, Draco shut down to everything but the sensation in his groin, and the warmth locked around him, and then he hunched forwards, made a sound that wasn't much more dignified than the cry Harry had given when he came, and let his orgasm blast out of him and into Harry's arse.

Harry muttered and murmured beneath him, twisting as though he was trying to rub his prostate against Draco's sinking cock. Draco did his best to oblige him, but he was weary and dazed and didn't think he was much help.

Harry sighed, reached down, and brought himself off with a few expert strokes. Draco stared at him. He hadn't even realized that Harry was hard again. He certainly hadn't touched him.

"Sorry," he said.

"Yes, you should be sorry for teaching me that fucking could be fun," Harry said, and stretched up to kiss Draco, ignoring the obscene amount of semen that squelched between them. "Don't worry about it. I came first, and the second was a surprise." He flopped back onto the pillow and lifted one eyebrow. "By the way, did you know you're deaf when you top? I was asking you questions, and you didn't respond."

"Your arse is too good," Draco said simply, and then dragged himself to the side, because he needed another nap and he didn't want to take it on top of the sticky mess on Harry's belly.

Harry appeared to consider that answer for a long, earnest time before he nodded and said, "All right. I can accept that."

Draco snorted, shut his eyes, and rolled again to the side so that he finally slid out of Harry's arse. Harry said something nonsensical as his cock came away. Draco thought he would ask him what it was in the morning or later in the afternoon.

At any rate. After his nap.

* * *

Harry turned his head sharply. Someone was pressing against their wards, and he didn't know who it was. He didn't even know what time it was. After Draco had fallen asleep, Harry had lain there watching him with bliss washing back and forth in great waves through his mind.

He was glad that he was there, with Draco. The thought repeated over and over again in various forms.

But now he had to put it aside and get up. Harry managed to stand, cast a Cleaning Charm, pulled on his outer robes, took a step, and promptly sprawled. He'd forgotten that Draco had pulled his trousers and pants down, not off.

That took a few more minutes of adjustment, and meanwhile, whoever it was had got impatient and started to cast _Finites _on their wards. Harry shook his head and called, "I'm coming!" Behind him, he felt Draco twitch but then sink deeper into sleep. _Good. _Harry hoped that he could have this conversation without waking Draco.

He expected to see Gregory on the other side of the wards, come with news about Nusquam, or Ron and Hermione, wanting to know where they'd been. Instead, Portillo Lopez was there, and she stepped into the tent without so much as an invitation, only nodding slightly at Harry as though she assumed that she was welcome anywhere.

"Look," Harry started, turning around.

"Yes, I can smell the sex," Portillo Lopez said. "I have smelled it before. That hardly concerns me."

Harry wrapped an arm around his flaming face. He was glad that Draco had, at any rate, remained asleep, because that meant _one _thing was going well.

"I have discovered a way to get behind the world," Portillo Lopez announced, "in the same place that you went into when Nihil attempted to abduct your partner yesterday."

Harry stared at her. "How did you know about that?"

Portillo Lopez waved her hand. "It was a large exercise of necromancy in the middle of a camp without necromancers—except for you, and I no longer include you among the ranks of the true devotees of that art. I felt it, of course. And I reasoned out the details of what must have happened later, from the impressions that your struggle left in the air and the earth, as well as my knowledge of your magic."

Harry swallowed, and made a mental note not to try and hide any secrets from Portillo Lopez. At least, not any magical secrets. "Then you must know who we were hiding in the tent."

"What?" Portillo Lopez nodded. "Oh, yes. Nusquam is dead. You have forced Nihil to destroy her, and I do not think he will easily create again a servant that is separate from him and can think as intelligently as she could. It is a victory. But I think my discovery is more important."

Harry nodded back. "All right. Tell me about it."

"No. Tell _us_."

Harry turned his head. Draco was on his feet, wrapped in the blanket, padding across the floor. He showed no sign of embarrassment in front of Portillo Lopez the way Harry would have thought he would, but instead wrapped an arm around Harry's shoulders and stood there staring Portillo Lopez down.

"Yes," Harry said, reveling in the sense of warmth and closeness he received from Draco's presence. "Tell us."

_I can depend on him. _He had known it before, but it was always nice to have it confirmed.


	10. Their First Weapon

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Ten—Their First Weapon_

"It is dreaming while you are awake. It might be easier for you to think of it that way."

Harry gritted his teeth. Just like all the other "easy" explanations that Portillo Lopez had come up with so far, he didn't think this one was particularly simple. "I can't dream while I'm awake," he said. "I can daydream. Is that what you mean?"

Portillo Lopez shook her head almost hard enough for the scarf to slide off her hair. They stood in a bubble of warmth beyond the camp, towards the place where they had kept Nusquam. Gregory leaned against a table that Harry thought she had conjured for the specific purpose of leaning—although Portillo Lopez had quickly taken it over with the hanks of thread and boxes of metal pieces that she seemed to need—watching critically. Draco stood just behind Harry and smoothed his shoulder with one hand now and then.

"Daydreams are too fragile to contain the information that must move through them," Portillo Lopez said. "Dreams are stronger and have some existence independent of us, in that we do not control them and alter them at our pleasure as we do with daydreams. And they take us behind the world, though through the route of the mind rather than through the route of death, unlike the road that Nihil has discovered."

Draco must have sensed Harry's tension, because he squeezed Harry's shoulder reassuringly and cut in before Harry could say anything. "I don't think the magical theory is necessary." He turned Harry to face him. "What did you do when you realized that I was in trouble? How did you reason out the best course of action?"

"I _didn't_," Harry snapped. He had already said this, and he couldn't comprehend why Draco would want to hear it again. He was usually impatient with repetition. "I saw you in trouble. I grabbed you and tore open a wound so that I could use blood for my necromancy. I didn't make any conscious effort to go after you, because I didn't know what had _happened_. I only know that I was following you a few seconds later."

"Ah," Portillo Lopez said, and smiled at him. "I should have known. Yes, you would find it harder to follow the road if you took your first steps onto it unwittingly. In this case, Nihil provided the means for you to walk it. You will have to learn to walk it on your own, and that is a separate process."

"That's the first bloody thing she's said that made sense," Harry muttered. Draco murmured soothingly in his ear while Portillo Lopez seized one of the threads from the table and pulled it taut between her hands.

"You know that you can use a piece of string to escape a maze," Portillo Lopez said. "Lay it down behind you, and it provides a trail that you can follow if you get lost." She brought her fingers closer together and looped them through the thread. "Of course, that is not the only game one may play with it." She moved both hands in a complex pattern, and Harry was looking at a spiderweb, a bigger one that he had thought could have been spun from a single piece of thread.

"Yes," Harry said, since Portillo Lopez had paused and looked at him, apparently expecting him to say something.

Portillo Lopez glanced back at her web. "The method of entering the road is the hardest part, but once there, you must also lay down a trail so that you can find your way back. In your case, you were able to use the blood from your wound. The sensation of warmth and life would call to you, given the contrast of darkness and cold all around you. But others, such as your partner, do not have that ability."

"I can lay down the road," Harry said, "but I don't know how to enter. On the other hand, Draco seems to understand your theory but he wouldn't be able to find his way back even if he bled before he went in. So why don't both of us work together at once, and counter our weaknesses like that?"

Portillo Lopez went silent. Gregory straightened up from her leaning posture on the table and clapped her hands together using only her fingertips. Draco dipped his head and whispered into Harry's ear, "You _are _very clever."

"Of course," Portillo Lopez said, before Harry could finish absorbing the shock and the sweetness of Draco's compliment. "You already work together as partners and you already share compatible magic. Why did I not envision you working together as a pair when it came to this?" She sounded vexed with herself.

"Everyone has a weakness," Gregory said. Harry wondered if Portillo Lopez would pick up on the sarcasm in her voice. Portillo Lopez might have, because she glanced at her sharply, but Gregory was staring so intently at Draco and Harry that she could claim to have missed that. "Well? I do not understand the theory, either. How do you propose to go behind death, Trainee Malfoy? And how do you know you will not get lost there?"

Harry turned around in interest. He'd like to know the answers to those questions, too. And it was nice to have the burden of doing the impossible resting on someone else for once.

* * *

Draco smiled. He hoped the smile would conceal his lack of confidence about what exactly he was going to do next. He understood the theory, but that was a long way from putting it into operation, as more than one of Professor Snape's students had learned.

But he would not show weakness in front of the instructors, and Harry looked at him with eyes full of a shining trust that Draco would give his life not to damage. He reached out and took the thread from Portillo Lopez's hands.

"I see the world differently than either you or she does," he explained to Harry, trying to ignore the way Gregory gave a thin smile. _Perhaps she knows this is a delaying tactic. _But Draco didn't intend to let her criticism worry him. "I see the weakness of the barriers, perhaps, more strongly, and I have more control over my thoughts and emotions, so the dreaming awake analogy makes more sense to me."

Harry didn't waste time barking that he _did so_ have control over his thoughts and emotions, the way Draco had thought he would. He nodded as if accepting the obvious and waited for more. Draco licked his lips and unfolded the string, tying a loop at the end of it and beginning to swing it around his head.

"I can also keep the paradox that Nihil told me about in mind. The idea of the fly moving in amber who doesn't know it's trapped and so can keep up that slow motion—slow only to someone looking at it from the outside, not to the fly. Nihil moves in _different _ways than we do, has his changes in clockwork positions, but that's still movement, that's still change." Draco swung the rope faster and fixed his eyes in front of him.

It took little to no effort to remember the sensations that had flooded him when Nihil pulled him into the dark. The memories that had leaked from his head. The icy teeth grinding into his limbs. The sense of hopelessness and despair.

Emotion was a kind of motion. Draco could feel the memories overwhelming him, the world they described replacing and wavering into the world that he stood in. He could still feel the sunlight, but distantly. He was amazed, privately, that Harry had been able to use his blood as a guide back to the real world. The sensations of the one where Nihil lived were so much more _powerful._

Shivers struck his spine and gripped his limbs. Draco could feel the string in his hand, but only the way he might have been able to feel a piece of ice with numb limbs. His body froze, and his mind leaped out of his head and pushed back the barriers.

At the last moment, he felt hands lock onto his shoulders as someone came with him. He was dimly grateful for that.

* * *

Harry had no doubt that they now stood in the same world Nihil had pulled Draco into. The darkness was the same, and the despair that crept over him, and the hanging cold that he could feel hissing past his ears in a motion that wasn't motion, like a frozen wind.

And he had no idea how Draco had done it. From what he'd seen, Draco had simply focused his gaze vaguely ahead, maybe using the spinning string to hypnotize himself, and gone into this place without moving. When the string had snapped taut, the loop at the end of it vibrating as if hooked over the neck of an invisible fly, Harry had lunged forwards and gripped Draco instinctively.

It was a good thing he had, he thought as his teeth began to chatter.

Draco was moving ahead of him in odd ways, creating dark silver ripples through the darkness that Harry could barely see. Now and then the string trembled, but it didn't move. Harry gritted his teeth and wondered for a moment how they were going to get back, since he hadn't spilled his blood this time.

Well, he could try to correct that. He removed one of his hands from Draco's shoulder and lifted it to his mouth.

He couldn't feel or find the skin. His teeth were chattering too hard to bite anyway. He glanced over his shoulder and saw nothing there but endless night, closed in thick and muffling as a fog.

_We're going to die here._

Harry clenched his teeth down, grinding them against each other to produce a modicum of sensation, and thought that it was probably hard to die when they were already behind death. He just had to find another way out of this situation, that was all.

Let's see. What had he had last time? Necromancy that wasn't necromancy. Snakes. Blood. A driving desire to see Draco rescued that meant he could fight against Nihil, will pitched against will, and win.

_That'll have to be enough right now, since I don't have anything else, _Harry thought, and slid his arms down Draco's neck until they were clasping the front of his chest. Draco's skin was like ice or metal under his hands, or perhaps petrified wood; Harry thought he had already lost the ability to distinguish between textures that similar. He thought of the way Draco had made love to him yesterday, the warmth and sliding of his body, the feeling of Draco's cock in his arse.

A twinge of pain soared through his muscles at the reminder, and Harry nearly groaned before he realized what that meant. If he could still feel something like this, then he might be able to feel other things, and each feeling would draw them closer and closer to the world they had left behind them.

Harry clenched his arse down, remembered the way Draco's eyes shone and the bruising grip of his fingers on Harry's hips, and began moving backwards, step by step. He didn't glance over his shoulder. He saw no reason to dishearten himself with the sight of a "landscape" that didn't move or change.

* * *

Draco knew he wasn't alone. Harry was at his back, yes, but in a distant way. They might have stood there with a pane of glass between them. Draco's attention was focused in front of him, on the darting, swimming things that plunged past him and then turned and came back again to study him without any sound.

He couldn't see them, either. He could _sense _them, but not as he would sense most other things, with a brush of wind against his cheek or a nearness that raised the hair on his spine. He no longer had cheeks or a spine here. His body was one whole plane of being and nothingness, like the insect trapped in amber.

Instead, he felt them as if he were in a dream.

_Think of this as a dream and it will be less frightening, _Draco told himself, though he knew he should experience fear only in an academic way. He felt interest instead. He waited until one of the plunging forms was next to him, drifting close enough to alter and stir the darkness and cold, and then shifted his perception. He could dream awake. That meant controlling, at least in part, what happened in the dream.

In seconds, or some other longer measure of time—it didn't matter, since both were equally meaningless here—he held a thrashing thing that resembled, so much as it resembled anything, a desperate fish.

Draco glanced over his shoulder, ready to tell Harry that he had something valuable and they could return to the real world.

He saw nothing. Blackness unrolled behind him. The ice encased his limbs and rendered both them and the creature he cradled motionless. He was already beginning to forget light, the way he had when Nihil held him prisoner.

_No_.

He hadn't given up last time, under far more hopeless circumstances. Draco leaned backwards, trying to convey the truth to Harry by the pressure of his back and shoulders. If Harry could feel them—and of course he could—he would know that Draco was ready to leave this place and come out from behind death.

* * *

Harry closed his eyes. He knew they might burn with tears, though heat was harder to imagine than most of the other things he was currently feeling. But Draco had pressed against him, and that indicated he still had his own spirit and desires. Harry took a step backwards, keeping his hands locked in place on Draco's chest, pulling Draco with him perforce.

Draco didn't reach back to help, for some reason. Perhaps his hands were stretched out in front of him to explore as much as they could of Nihil's domain before he was pulled back, Harry thought. It didn't matter. He didn't need to speculate on that part of this journey, because Draco was the one who had handled it and the one who would give him a coherent account—or not—when they were back with Gregory and Portillo Lopez.

Draco was above him, pushing into him, his eyes wide and wild. Draco was above him on the bed in Malfoy Manor, this time accepting Harry's cock into _his _arse, his head tilting back and his throat working as he struggled to gulp back words. Harry could taste his tongue, hear the crunch his teeth made when they came together in crisp food, and smell the very slightly scented shampoo that he'd tended to use when they still shared a room in the barracks.

Harry thought and remembered, thought and remembered, and, when the coldness of the world around him seemed to drain those memories dry, thought of new ones rather than clinging to the old. He had many, didn't he? He and Draco had been friends for more than a year, lovers for months. That was plenty.

He raised barriers against the darkness around them, barriers of perception and desire, and the darkness snapped away and dripped down the walls of the world like tar.

Harry gasped and found himself on his knees in the bubble of warmth, his hands still locked faithfully around Draco's chest. Draco _did _cough and tug at Harry's arms, and Harry realized that there might be a problem with blocking Draco's air supply, now that he was kneeling. He sheepishly let him go.

"You nearly died."

Portillo Lopez was stooping over them, shaking her head. Harry looked at her through hazy eyes and wondered what she would do if he pulled off her head-scarf. It was making a bid for freedom anyway.

"Next time," Portillo Lopez said, "you _must _bleed before you go into Nihil's world. It is a surprise that you made it back at all. You used memories, but memories are fragile things, and if you had spent too long in the darkness without thinking of that tactic, you might have lost them all without finding the way back." She reached down and took Harry's hand, squeezing it. Harry gasped. His fingers were waking up from what felt like intense sleep with a chorus of pins and needles. "Did you _think_?"

"Not really," Harry admitted. "I just wanted Draco safe."

"I'm more than safe."

Draco turned around. Harry stared. He had an ingot of blue-black in his arms, something that thrashed weakly and then fell back into stillness. It was hard to focus on, since Harry kept expecting to see depth to it and it had none.

"How did you get that?" he asked. "What is it?"

"I captured one of the things I could feel swimming around me," Draco said simply, and then looked down at the blue-blackness as if even he was puzzled or dazed by it. "And I think it's one of the dead."

* * *

Draco didn't think he _needed _to sit in the tent where they had kept Nusquam, a mug of hot tea in his hands and a blanket thrown over his knees. He had felt far better and stronger when he came out of that second sojourn in the darkness than he had the first time. He hadn't forgotten heat or sunlight. And he wanted to see what Portillo Lopez and Gregory could do with the dead spirit or thing he had captured.

But Harry had insisted, and from the way he had trouble keeping his hands off Draco's shoulders, Draco knew that it would save time to give in and do as he wanted. So he sat down, and sighed, and rolled his eyes to an invisible audience when none of the real one was looking, and settled for watching Gregory and Portillo Lopez through the gap in the flap of the tent.

They had laid the blue-blackness on the ground and were casting a mirrored shield of some sort over it. Draco could occasionally hear Gregory's questions, most of them concerning the thing's nature. Portillo Lopez answered only once or twice, her brow wrinkled and her wand in constant motion.

"I thought I'd lost you."

Harry insisted on kneeling in front of him and blocking his view. Draco smiled at him temperately and remembered how he had felt two days ago when Harry had brought him out of the blackness. This time, he hadn't been afraid of getting lost forever, and he thought it reasonable to be less affected, although Harry wasn't.

"You didn't," Draco said, and patted his hand. "Don't you think it's an achievement, though, bringing that spirit out of Nihil's realm? It might even be one that Nihil enslaved himself, or at least that he knew how to use."

"It's remarkable," Harry said, and Draco felt a flood of warmth more persistent than anything the tea could give him. "It wouldn't have been worth your life, though."

Draco sighed and shifted in place. "But if I'd died there, then that thing wouldn't have come with me out of the darkness, either," he said. "So it's not a case of choosing one over the other. One _depends _on the other. You could have died as easily if I did, and that would mean more to the world, losing you, than losing me would."

"It doesn't make any difference to me," Harry answered stubbornly. "We're talking about emotional reasons, not logical reasons."

Draco hesitated, then let his hand rest on Harry's shoulder so that he could press down. "I appreciate that," he said softly. "I'll think more about it in the future. If we go on hunting expeditions for Nihil's people, then we should be able to make sure that we survive them. And there are other things I'd like to do than die heroically in the pursuit of new knowledge."

"No kidding," Harry muttered. "I brought us back because I held onto the memories of you talking to me and having sex with me. I'd like to do a lot more of that." He looked up at Draco, and his eyes were luminous.

Draco smiled helplessly and reached down to touch the side of his face. "I have to admit that I would, too," he muttered.

A loud bang sounded from outside the tent, rather as though someone had speared a balloon full of air that had exploded. Draco jerked back and turned to look. He saw Portillo Lopez rising to her feet, waving her wand hastily back and forth and chanting in frantic Latin. Gregory had leaped ten feet back on the blue-black thing's other side and was doing the same thing, though her Latin was more clipped and her incantations shorter.

The blue-black thing was bleeding on the ground—if you could call emitting a colorless liquid and a foul smell bleeding. Draco stared as it lost its shape, and then set aside the cup of tea and surged to his feet.

"I'd like you to stay away from that," Harry said mildly.

Draco wasn't fooled by the mildness, but he also had no time for it. "I can't," he said and bolted out of the tent, his wand drawn and his mind bristling with memories of Nihil again. If he had to, he would step back into the dark realm with the creature and see if being there would heal it.

Harry cursed and followed him. Draco didn't bother looking around. He was welcome in any attempt to contain or tame the creature's blood, assuming it was as harmful as Portillo Lopez and Gregory thought it was. If he tried to grab Draco and drag him out of danger's way, then Draco would cast a Body-Bind on him and take his wand and that would be the end of _that_ for a while.

Unfortunately, by the time he arrived, the excitement was over. Gregory had gathered up the smell and the liquid together in a glass globe that looked like a Muggle light. Portillo Lopez was calmly chopping up pieces of the blue-blackness and laying them out like pieces of fish.

"What happened?" Draco demanded.

Portillo Lopez looked up. "This is not a spirit of the dead," she said calmly, but with an undertone of excitement that made Harry press heavily against Draco's back. "It is part of the darkness itself. We disrupted its integrity when we tried to carve it up. Now we have the trick of it, and we are spared an outburst from death into our world." She smiled. "We may even have to thank the imbalance of the forces of life and death for the fact that you were able to bring this into our world in the first place."

"What are you doing?" Harry asked. Draco relaxed. Harry had stopped thinking exclusively about Draco's safety if he could ask that question.

"Making a weapon out of it," Portillo Lopez said, as if genuinely surprised at the question, and returned to her chopping.

Draco experienced a rush of pure bliss. They might not yet have torture techniques that worked reliably against Nihil, but he had helped in the development of their first weapon.


	11. The Comitatus In Spring

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Eleven—The Comitatus In Spring_

"This is the first prototype of our new weapon."

Draco kept his eyes fixed firmly forwards, so that he couldn't look around and embarrass himself by seeking out the expressions on people's faces. Most of them were likely hopeful, anyway, without the admiration or wonder that would have fed his ego.

"Look at it carefully," Holder went on, pacing in front of their ranks. She held up the blue-black, compact thing—it was so shiny that it was hard to make out its shape, but it looked like the butt of a whip to Draco—and then tossed it into the air. A few people cried out anxiously, but Holder caught the weapon and looked at them with a smug smile.

_She did that on purpose, _Draco thought, his heart still hammering with the belief that the weapon he'd helped to create would be destroyed. _Bitch._

Holder held the thing out towards them. Draco squinted. It was still hard to focus his eyes on it even though he knew what he was looking for, and he could hear similar discontented murmurs from the others.

"Each partnership will be given one to wield," Holder said, and her voice was deadly serious now. Her eyes bored into Draco and Harry as if she thought they would be the ones to disregard her instructions and kill themselves. Draco put his chin up and wondered how much she knew of the part they'd played in the development of the weapon. Not much, likely; Portillo Lopez and Gregory had presented the weapon as their accomplishment. Draco and Harry had agreed that they should, so as to get Robards and Holder to actually listen, but it still stung. "You must use them _carefully._ If you lose them, they will not be replaced. Wield them only on the living dead or on the people or creatures you suspect to have been taken over by Nihil. Others will not be hurt by them, and can still hurt you with spells."

Heads bobbed all around him; Draco could hear the rustling of hair against robe collars. He nodded with the rest. What else could he do? He understood the limitations of the weapon better than Holder did, but he was at her mercy for the present.

Harry tucked an elbow against his side. Draco smiled, and knew it was a tight smile, but he wanted to show Harry that he understood and appreciated the reassurance. He made the smile vanish when Holder glanced at him again.

"To wield the weapon," Holder said, "you will clasp it in one hand and aim either end at the creature you wish to destroy. Or to test," she added, with a small, mean smile that Draco thought she had used just to make other people gulp. "If you suspect that someone is a servant of Nihil, this will provide the proof that they are not. Or are."

She turned and aimed the thing high. Draco glanced up. Two Aurors, Ketchum and Jones, were dragging something that struggled and snarled and hissed into the middle of the clearing where the trainees stood. This was their new camp, the one they had come to with the end of winter, and the grass wasn't completely churned into mud yet. It was enough so to make drops of it fly from the struggling creature's feet, though.

Harry stiffened next to him. Draco glanced at him but could make nothing out of the expression on his face, so he turned back to the thing.

It had shriveled skin like a dried prune, and it lunged and snapped at its captors with oversize teeth. Otherwise, it looked normal, a boy who might have been sixteen or so, but Draco knew at once that it was one of the living dead.

A murmur of revulsion ran through the students. Holder grinned over her shoulder, clearly loving that, and then took aim with the weapon at the boy. He went still in a moment, staring at her. Or, no, Draco thought, not at her. At the weapon in her hand. His overlarge teeth clapped down again, and he looked as wary as a mouse in front of a hawk.

"Now," Holder said, in a detached voice that made Draco's jaws ache. "When you have the weapon aimed, you will squeeze down with both hands at once, on opposite sides. And then you must stand still. If you aim it elsewhere or wander in front of it, you may disrupt the weapon's working and allow your prey to attack you."

The weapon trembled and spat. The air between Holder and the living corpse turned blue-black. Draco blinked and blinked again. He kept thinking that he should be able to make out some pattern in the color, like a lightning bolt or a sheet of mist, and it kept eluding him.

There was no doubt about its effect on the living dead boy, though.

His arms flailed at the air so hard that Jones had trouble holding onto him. His mouth opened, and then kept opening. The darkness from it traveled down the front of his face and then over the back of his head and kept expanding, while his teeth ripped loose of his jaw and zipped through the air. The trainees ducked them with cries of disgust. Draco didn't, but that was because he'd had the sense to raise a Shield Charm around himself the moment he saw the weapon take effect.

The boy's mouth kept opening, and his dried flesh tore in front of it. Then something swirled up from the mouth, something soft and smoky and clinging like wool. Draco thought it would have felt like wool if he had put out his hand to touch it, too.

The smoky thing dived beneath the earth and faded. At the same moment, the blue-black light ceased and the body collapsed into mucky piles of skin and bone. The demonstration was done. Jones and Ketchum stepped back, both wringing their hands to remove the last bits of grey flesh. Ketchum was smiling. Jones simply looked revolted.

"That is the way to use them," Holder went on, turning back to the trainees. "Does anyone need any more instruction?" She looked like she would be happy to provide it to anyone who asked, and Draco knew why. It would give her more chances to destroy the living dead that it seemed the Aurors had finally managed to capture, and she was happiest when she was destroying things.

Granger raised her hand and asked a question that she already knew the answer to, considering how intensively she had worked with Gregory and Portillo Lopez, as well as Harry and Draco, to produce the weapon. But Draco knew that she would say she was doing this for the sake of people too shy to ask questions if he teased her about it. "What was that smoky thing that escaped his mouth?"

"We don't know, exactly," Holder said. "The weapon can't touch it. We like to think that it was his spirit fleeing control, going home, but of course we cannot be sure."

A few people looked more revolted than before. Draco rolled his eyes. There were some who wouldn't be contented until someone had gentled the whole world for them, wrapped all the nasty dangers in protective glass and then smoothed the paths so that they wouldn't trip as they wandered through and gaped.

"I see," Granger said, and fell silent, frowning heavily. It was the same objection she had raised during the weapon's development, Draco remembered. He didn't think she was honestly worried about hurting the spirits of the dead; she must know (at least, if she was rational, and Draco thought she was, most of the time) that being dead would hurt the spirits less than whatever Nihil had done to them while he possessed them. But she didn't like not knowing the answers to things.

"Now," Holder said, and raised her hand with a grand, sweeping motion that made Draco think she could have been a good actress. Better an actress than the second-in-command of the Aurors, at any rate. Weston and Lowell came forwards holding an armful each of the shiny blue-black objects. "Here are your weapons. You will both train to use them, and do nothing else, for the next two days."

Draco sighed. He and Harry already knew how to use them, thanks to being part of the testing. That meant he would suffer a lot of boredom in the next two days.

"Look at it this way," Harry said, in a whisper that actually managed to be a whisper instead of a half-shout. "That just means that we can spend the next few days working on something else, and Holder doesn't have an excuse to punish us."

Draco bit his lip to muffle his chuckle. Unfortunately, Holder turned around at that same moment and saw him.

"Did you have something to say, Trainee Malfoy?" she asked, stalking towards him with her robes flowing and snapping behind her. She could still have taken pointers on it from Professor Snape, Draco thought.

"Not as such, Auror Holder," he said. "I was just thinking that we might have an advantage in using this weapon because we've been partners for a longer time than others." It was the best excuse he could offer, since Holder and Robards were both determined not to let anyone else among the trainees know about Harry and Draco's ability to enter Nihil's world, or Harry's necromancy.

Holder stared into his eyes as if she assumed that her gaze was Veritaserum. Draco looked back calmly. _My father did this better, bitch._

Holder finally shrugged and turned away. "You and Trainee Potter will give the first demonstration on Wednesday," she said over her shoulder.

Draco sneered at her back. If she thought that an opportunity to gain adulation and glory would intimidate him, then she hadn't understood his psychology at all.

Of course, he thought understanding his psychology was low on her list of priorities, while he wanted to know more about her so that he could determine how much he should hurt her for hurting Harry.

Harry reached out a hand and accepted the blue-black weapon that Weston was handing them at that moment. Weston raised an eyebrow, whispered, "Only remember that you should not rely on this exclusively as a substitute for your compatible magic," and was gone before Draco could retort that that was a stupid thing to think they'd do.

Harry turned the object over, and shivered. Draco reached out gingerly. He had helped a lot in the stages that this went through, yes, but he hadn't touched the finished project, which had needed strong doses of Portillo Lopez's magic and which she had therefore worked on alone.

The butt of the weapon was smooth and slick beneath his fingers; it was like touching wet ice. Draco shook his fingers out and drew them away. When he glanced up, he found that Harry had his head bowed and was frowning at the weapon.

"What?" Draco whispered.

"There's this—thrumming running through it," Harry whispered back. "I didn't realize that would be there."

Draco frowned and touched the weapon again. He couldn't feel anything but silence and solidity. "Well, I don't feel that, but what about the cold?"

"It's not cold," Harry said, giving him a sharp look. "It's warm."

Draco shivered a bit himself. Bringing weapons back from beyond death was not at all a simple thing to do, as he knew from venturing into Nihil's realm twice more to grab pieces of the void. But he had somehow thought, without even thinking about why, that making the pieces into solid things that one could touch and hold would eliminate their strangeness.

There were unhappy murmurs all around them that said other partnerships were finding that out. Draco glanced over at Granger and Weasley. They both hovered above the weapon, which lay in Weasley's hands, and apparently Granger was taking notes on a parchment draped across her arm.

Draco turned to Ventus and Herricks. He regarded the thing with dread, while Ventus spun it in her hands with a small smile, getting used to the weight. Draco was sure that she would be comfortable with it long before anyone else was.

Draco sighed. He knew that they would have to incorporate Herricks into the comitatus, because he was Ventus's partner and she had worked well with him so far, and they had been trying to expose him to the information they'd accumulated and the experiences they'd had outside the structure of the Auror hierarchy. He had accepted it with horrified glances and timidity so far, as well as horrified fascination. He was more rule-bound than Granger, and prone to underplay his own talents much like Harry.

Herricks glanced up as if he could tell that Draco was thinking of him and scowled in his direction. Draco noted that he switched his attention back to Ventus and the weapon a moment later, as if he thought she shouldn't be left alone with it.

Draco sighed again. _If we want her—and we do—then we have to have him there. I can only hope that his timidity is a good thing and will make him submit to my leadership a bit more._

* * *

"No. Why should you be the leader? You despise the Aurors, and I'll be astonished if you make a good one."

Harry winced. He had thought that they might have trouble with Herricks, but not this particular kind of trouble.

Draco watched Herricks with glittering eyes. They were in the middle of Harry and Draco's tent, which Draco had taken the chance to enlarge with wizardspace when they moved camps. There were chairs for everyone, but only Hermione was actually sitting down. Ron stood behind her chair warily, as if he assumed that he would have to defend her from something, Ventus was on her feet and facing Draco, and Herricks was on _his _feet with his arms folded.

"Everyone else in the comitatus has accepted me," Draco said. "Including your partner. Don't you trust her judgment?"

"Not always," Herricks said.

Harry snorted, and then tried to turn it into a muffled cough when Draco scowled at him. He had to agree, though. Ventus was an excellent fighter, but she had little concern for her own safety, and she revered Draco to the point that it could hurt her sometimes.

Draco shook his head. "You can accept my leadership, or you can leave the comitatus. They have even less reason to follow someone like you, who's new to most of them and has only worked in-depth with Ventus. You haven't shared what we have. If you want to challenge me, you'd have to give a better reason than your being uneasy with it."

Herricks shook his head. He hadn't moved, and Harry thought that Draco had probably overestimated his vulnerability. "I don't want to take the leadership myself, but I object to obeying you when you might order me to do something stupid."

Draco closed his eyes in the way that Harry recognized as coming right before his tension headaches. He reached over Draco's shoulder and started massaging his temples, making as many soothing noises as he could.

Draco tilted his head back so that he rubbed against Harry's fingers, and spoke without opening his eyes. "Listen to me, Herricks. I'll explain my decisions as much as I can. You can question them. Granger certainly does."

"Of course I do," Hermione muttered. "I always questioned the decisions Harry made, too. We might not be here if I hadn't."

Harry smiled at her. Hermione, for some reason, flushed and looked away. Ron put a hand on her shoulder to reassure her in much the same way that Harry was trying to reassure Draco. Or, at least, Harry thought it was the same. He didn't always identify the emotions his best friends were feelings as well as he could identify Draco's.

_On the other hand, to do that, I'd probably have to sleep with them. _Harry shuddered from the thought and dropped his hands as Draco opened his eyes and stepped forwards again.

"But if I say something in the midst of battle, then I want you to listen," Draco said. "And we'll probably be fighting plenty of battles that we won't have time to make detailed plans for, and which the Aurors wouldn't let us fight if they knew."

"I don't know why you oppose everything your comitatus does to what the 'Aurors' know and do and like," Herricks said, frowning. "Aren't you training to become Aurors yourselves? Why do you assume that you're something different or opposite from them? You speak as if you were."

Draco paused and frowned. Harry had to smile. He thought that Hermione would have used bigger words to make the point, but otherwise it was something she might have brought up.

"Yes, exactly!" Hermione was sitting up in her chair, cheeks on fire with emotion, eyes shining. "_Why _do we act as though we can't go to the Aurors for help, or as if all of them would hate us fighting our own battles? They want people to work together. That's why they've pushed together so many new partners." She looked meaningfully at Ventus and Herricks, though Harry didn't think either one noticed. "They would be proud and happy when we tell them that we've formed the comitatus. They might adopt the form to use in other situations."

"No, they wouldn't," Ventus said. "I told you about the comitatus. Our primary loyalty is to each other. We can fight apart in partnerships, but we also bring new strengths into the comitatus. The Aurors would either waste a lot of time trying to make everyone into groups like ours—when they have to happen naturally—or they would assume it was bad because _we _were the ones who did it and force us apart." She didn't sound upset, Harry thought, but as if she were simply speaking a fact.

"But that would be stupid of them." Hermione was frowning and tapping her fingers on her elbow.

"You assumed the Aurors were paragons of intelligence?" Draco raised his eyebrows. "Oh, _dear_, Granger."

Hermione had the good grace to smile at that. "But we should still approach them," she said. "Portillo Lopez and Gregory helped us with this weapon. I don't think trying to act without them will get us anywhere." She paused and scowled at Draco as though she had suddenly realized something. "What _were _you planning on doing without them, anyway? What's the next task that you're envisioning for the comitatus?"

Harry leaned back against the wall and watched Draco with some interest. He had to admit that he didn't know what secrets Draco was keeping, either. He hadn't seen fit to spill them this time.

Draco remained still, turning his head from side to side so that he could survey them all individually. Harry stayed where he was, but Draco still glanced at him for long, quiet moments. Harry became aware, when Draco turned away, that he was standing up straighter than normal and drawing in his stomach. He slumped again and scowled.

"Nihil hasn't attacked us for months," Draco said. "Long enough for us to assemble that weapon, enough for winter to start passing. Why? What could be more important than killing people who killed one of his people and who are developing weapons against him?"

"He might not know about the weapon," Ron said. "How could he?"

"He has spies." Draco flicked his fingers as though he accepted the possibility and found it not worth worrying about. "I know that. The most important thing is that he might not know of a way to counter it yet. But he'll invent it in time." He began pacing back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back. "But he hasn't visibly come into camp to test it yet. Why not? What's he doing instead? We should find out what that is and disrupt it."

"That makes sense," Herricks said slowly. He seemed to have forgotten to be upset about Draco being the leader. "But how can we learn what he's doing? We can't send any spies after him. We don't know where he is."

"We have the means of finding out," Draco said, and turned to Harry.

Harry winced. He'd told Draco more about his visions of Nihil—the rare ones he'd had, anyway—in the last few days. He'd thought Draco was asking out of idle curiosity. He should have remembered that wasn't one of Draco's motives.

"I don't know how to control the things I see," he said flatly, before Draco could say anything. "And the visions I've had seemed to focus on Catherine Arrowshot. I haven't had one in a long time, so she might be dead."

"Who's Catherine Arrowshot?" Herricks demanded. "The one who disappeared? The traitor?"

Hermione explained to him while Draco met Harry eye to eye and seemed to exude an aura of calm. Harry shook his head. "You're not getting your way this time," he said. "I don't even know why I have visions. How could you expect me to use them for the good of the comitatus if I don't know why?"

"We know more about Nihil than we did when you had the last vision," Draco said. "I think that you can use the imbalance of the forces of life and death to take a good look at him. At least, if my theory is correct," he added.

"What theory?" Harry folded his arms. Ron was paying close attention to them, frowning. Harry hoped that he could at least count on Ron's support not to do this mad thing if it came to that. Ventus watched with bright eyes, which meant she would be no help, with her faith in everything Draco did.

"The theory that says that you and Nihil are connected because both of you have special connections to life and death," Draco said. He was utterly serene, and Harry had to admit that that was calming him down, although it still wouldn't make him do things against his will. "He's the one who disrupted the world so much by raising armies of the living dead, and you're the last bit of the Dark Lord remaining in the world."

Harry blinked. "An interesting way to look at it," he said finally.

"I'm right, though?" Draco said. Only someone who knew him as well as Harry did would have known that he was asking a question. "Portillo Lopez _did _say that your art of necromancy was probably there because you had a connection to the Dark Lord?"

Harry shrugged. "That wouldn't help me all that much if I'm supposed to make the connection to Nihil. And remember that our attempts to invade his mind have never gone very well."

"This theory that I have is based on resonance similarity," Draco said. Harry rolled his eyes—Draco knew he didn't do well with magical theory—and Draco hurried to explain. At least he did it better than Portillo Lopez. "When two magical objects in the world are extremely similar, they set up a conduit between themselves. Not consciously; Dark artifacts and books can do it too. They have to be more than identical copies of each other, though, so it wouldn't work with, say, two copies of the same book. The conduit is a tunnel that results in an exchange of magic, and any magic that's used by or on them set up sympathetic changes in the other. If you ripped out a page of one book, you might find the page with the same number in the similar book damaged. I know of a case where two magical swords both melted although both of them were only heated a bit. The fire was magical, so that made the conduit vibrate between them, and the exchange of magic went on and on, amplifying each time, until it triggered the melting process."

"All right," Harry said, mind reeling with images of invisible tunnels and magical vibrations stretching through space. "But how does that help with a vision, instead of damage?"

Draco smiled. "The connection between you and the Dark Lord was based on similar pieces of soul. Shape a piece of your mind so that it's similar to Nihil's, and I think you can get through."

_No wonder he doesn't see anything wrong with this plan, _thought Harry after a stunned moment. _He's already mental himself._


	12. A Series of Small Arguments

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Twelve—A Series of Small Arguments_

"Harry—"

"No."

_Well, that was quick, _Draco thought in annoyance. He sat down beside Harry, who'd had his back turned to him and his arms folded for about fifteen minutes no. Draco had tried to start other topics, but Harry had always sensed that they would lead into the one he didn't want to talk about and had refused to respond. Then Draco had tried simply speaking to him, and he shut _that _down.

He would have to get used to talking about it, though, because it was a good idea, something they needed to do, and Draco wasn't simply going to give it up.

For a few moments, Draco was silent, thinking of his next strategy, and gazing absently across the camp in front of them. This camp was more interesting than the last; it had small hills ringing it, and Harry often went to sit on one of them when he needed to brood—that is, think, Draco amended it in his mind. He would get along better with Harry if he wasn't automatically dismissive of him.

Soft green grass was just beginning to come out on the hills, and the sky was milder and bluer than Draco could remember seeing it for months. A few clouds floated directly above the hill in front of them, gamboling about with the wind as if they were substituting for sheep. Draco felt his muscles relax as he gazed at it. Yes, he could see why Harry liked this view.

"I don't want to do it for more reasons than you know."

Draco started, but took care to keep his eyes straight ahead. Turning to look at Harry right now might put too much pressure on him, and he didn't want to do that. He simply grunted, as if it didn't matter to him whether or not Harry chose to talk about this.

"I mean," Harry said, and then trailed off. Draco clenched his right hand into a fist at his side, where Harry couldn't see it, and forced himself to wait. Harry made a sound as if he were clearing his throat and continued, "During the war, I was able to see into Voldemort's head through the link that existed between us. Mostly due to my scar, but also to the—the piece of his soul that I carried inside me."

_Even now it's hard for him to talk about that, _Draco thought, frowning. _Why? Are the memories of the visions that bad? Or does he think that he's somehow tainted because he got a piece of the Dark Lord's soul buried inside him without his consent?_

"This would be like doing that again," Harry whispered. "Exposing myself to something evil for the war effort. I survived it last time, but barely. Voldemort could have turned the connection around, opened it, and made me betray everything that I knew. That's—that's what he did in my fifth year, when he gave me a false vision of my godfather being in trouble. That's what got Sirius killed, because I dashed off to the Department of Mysteries thinking he was there. What if Nihil did something like that again? I don't think it's worth the risk, Draco."

Draco edged nearer and wrapped an arm around Harry. Harry leaned against him with a sigh. Draco stroked his shoulder for a moment and hoped that Harry didn't think this meant he'd given up on his idea, because he hadn't.

"I didn't know that," Draco said. "But with _these _visions, you'll have someone right beside you to tell you if something goes wrong."

Harry chuckled darkly. "Hermione tried to tell me that something was wrong with the vision of Sirius, too. I didn't listen to her. And can you be inside my head every single hour of the day? If Nihil sends me a vision or starts changing my thoughts, are you going to know?" He shook his head so that his hair rustled against Draco's neck. "It's just no _good_, Draco. I'm terrified of sharing my head with him, and his mind is so non-human that it almost destroyed me once before when I touched it. I won't do it."

Draco licked his lips. It was still a good idea, he felt, but he had underestimated the depth of Harry's resistance.

"Harry," he said softly. "I would be right by your side. I would do everything I could to help you. Will you _please _think about making a part of your mind at least similar to Nihil's? Will you do the preliminary work while Granger and I and the rest of the comitatus try to come up with ways to make it safer?"

Harry stiffened. Draco waited, but his waiting, this time, resulted in Harry shoving him away and whirling around. Draco sprawled on the earth, blinking up as Harry bent over him, his face dark with rage.

"I told you all this that I've never told anyone before," Harry said softly. "All this that I _wouldn't _tell someone other than you who'd suggested it. I trust you more than my own best friends, Draco. I trust you more than the rest of the comitatus. You're my leader and my lover and my friend. And still you're urging me to do something that's both dangerous and likely impossible? _Still _you're acting as though it would be perfectly all right for me to do?"

"We don't know how dangerous it is," Draco said, getting his hands and knees under him and keeping a cautious eye on Harry as he struggled to stand. "I wouldn't send you into danger without being sure."

"You're trying to do that now." Harry's eyes could _burn _when he was angry. Draco stared, wondering why he'd never seen that before, and then winced as he realized that it was probably because he'd never made Harry this angry. "Look, I understand that we need to know what Nihil is up to. But there's one other option that we could try. We know he likes to hide in the old Death Eater caches. And _we have a map of them. _We could at least try to spy on him that way before we send me into his mind."

Draco shook his head. "I think that would be more dangerous," he said.

"Why?" Harry was practically spitting. "Because this way, I'm the only one who gets damaged, and I should be able to fucking _handle _that? Because you want to protect the precious skins of the rest of the comitatus, but mine doesn't matter?"

"Yours matters more to me than anyone's!" Draco snapped. He hadn't been angry before, but he could feel the emotion stirring in him now, far beneath the surface, a glow of cold light that was slowly rising. "Or haven't I proved that already by the way I try to take care of you?"

"You seem to believe it some of the time and ignore it the rest." Harry regarded him with bleak eyes. "You want me to do this because it was your idea, I think, more than anything. When I tell you that I won't, that should be enough reason for you to back off and seek a different solution, but you won't."

Draco opened his mouth so hard that his jaw clicked, then shut it again. "Yes," he said. "Well. I think it's a _good _idea."

"But not the only one we can have," Harry said. "Admit it. How much of your opposition to my cache-hunting idea is that you didn't think of it first?"

Draco scowled. At times it was hard to have someone around who knew him so well. "What would you suggest, then? We can't just search all the caches randomly. He'll know that we're coming if we pick the wrong one and then botch something in our search."

"We need information about what he's doing," Harry said calmly, "not to find him. I suggest that we study spells that will allow us to read the memories of objects, and then we'd be able to figure out who touched them last and what traces of magic they were carrying around with them. What?" he added, when Draco hesitated. "Don't those spells exist? I know that Weston said something about them the other day, when she was talking about the ways for partners to leave messages behind for each other when they're separated."

Draco fidgeted in place. "It would take a long time to study and master those spells," he said. He didn't want to reveal his true objection, which was that Harry wouldn't be able to learn the magical theory behind them.

"Longer than it would take me to make my mind similar to Nihil's, especially when he's not human and I don't want to do it?" Harry countered instantly.

Draco thought about it, then conceded the point with a nod and stood. Harry clasped his arm to help him. When he got up, they stood there a moment looking into each other's eyes. Draco watched the way that Harry's breath ruffled his fringe and tried to understand the mixture of love, annoyance, and anger he felt.

"I do love you," Harry said, smiling at him. "But sometimes you're so stubbornly attached to your own ideas that it's difficult to communicate with you."

Draco could feel his jaw trying to fall open at the hypocrisy. He thought it was best to lean forwards and kiss Harry, so that that wouldn't happen.

* * *

"I just want to know whether you're capable of leading in battle. I thought it was a fairly basic question."

Harry closed his eyes and massaged his forehead. He had to admit that Herricks was standing up for himself and his partner, nothing else, and that he had every right to do so. But his row with Draco had been going on for an hour now.

Of course, it didn't help that Draco kept trying to change the topic and get Herricks distracted from his central goal: whether Draco was going to be a good leader when they actually fought Nihil. It made him seem as if he didn't want to answer the question. Or else that he couldn't. Harry knew which one Herricks would assume.

"Yes, I am," Draco said, the brittle snap of frost in his voice. "Are you going to ask any more idiotic questions, or can we get back to planning this?"

Harry dropped his hand from his face and looked, in some dread. Herricks sat across from them at the plain wooden table that was almost the only furniture in Ventus's tent, his arms folded and his face so bright with his scowl that Harry wondered how he could ever have thought the bloke was timid. Draco stood across from him, finger jabbing the map of Death Eater caches on the table, and _his _face had acquired an extra brilliance from his scowl, too.

"I don't think it's an idiotic question," Herricks said. "Ursula has told me about your last battle against Nihil. It sounds like you survived mostly through luck, not through planning. None of you knew about Harry's necromancy then or whether it would work, did you?" His gaze went briefly to Harry's face.

Harry couldn't help frowning. Herricks had started calling everyone in the comitatus—bar Draco—by their first names. Harry was happy if he was that comfortable with Ventus and Hermione and Ron, but he didn't think that _they _were such good friends.

"Well?" Herricks raised his eyebrows. "Is someone going to answer me? Ursula is many things, but I've never found her to be a liar."

"That was at a time when we didn't truly understand our opponent," Draco said. "We do now, and we can plan better for a battle like the one that ended up happening in Wiltshire. That's what we're trying to do. Do you have anything _useful _to contribute, or are you going to fuss and faff around for no reason?"

"I don't think trying to protect my partner's life and my own—as well as the life of everyone involved in this comitatus—is for no reason," Herricks said, and his voice had grown distinctly cool.

Harry heard Hermione sigh. She'd tried to intervene earlier, but Herricks had only ignored her and Draco had shot her a withering glare, and she hadn't tried again. Ron hadn't tried at all. He found watching someone challenge Draco entertaining, Harry thought. At least he was leaning forwards now, his hand on the back of Hermione's chair and a vicious grin that he couldn't conceal on his lips.

Ventus sat by, swinging her legs and looking as if she would follow whoever triumphed. Or as if she was so certain of Draco's triumph that she saw no reason at all to stop this stupid row.

That left it up to Harry.

"Listen," he said, and Herricks snapped his head around to stare at him. The expression of surprise on his face wasn't very flattering, Harry thought. Herricks must have expected him to stand by and follow Draco like a good little boyfriend. "What exactly is the matter? Do you want to lead yourself?"

Herricks shook his head. "Of course not. I'd be no good at it." Draco's mouth twisted in a sneer, but Harry thought it was refreshing that they had _someone _in the comitatus who knew himself that well. Maybe this was part of why Weston and Lowell had thought he would make a good partner for Ventus. "But I need to know that someone I'm entrusting my life to, and Ursula's life, is a good leader."

"What would constitute proof for you, though?" Harry scratched the nape of his neck. "It sounds as though you won't be satisfied until you've seen Draco lead a battle, but if you don't agree until then, you could get in the way and disrupt his perfectly competent leadership because of your doubts."

Herricks opened his mouth, then shut it again. "I hadn't thought of that," he said. "For right now, I'll settle for a plan that doesn't sound as though we need large amounts of luck to make it work."

"Luck is always a factor when we're fighting Nihil," Harry said, in time to beat Draco's snarl. "We don't understand everything he can do, and he might find a new way past the weapon that all the Aurors are so proud of. In the meantime, we're going to try and pick a cache that he might be in, but we're hunting information, not him. So really, we need to be able to sneak in and read the memories of the objects or do something else to learn what he's up to, rather than engage in a battle."

Herricks nodded. "That sounds clear. And it's not what he was saying." He stared at Draco. "He never explained clearly to me what was happening at all."

"I tried," Draco said. His voice was under tight, fragile control, which Harry knew was a bad sign. "You didn't want to listen. You kept looking at other people as if they were the ones who would explain, and then you turned around and demand the same fucking explanation _that I already gave._"

Harry put a hand on Draco's shoulder and squeezed it, then looked steadily at Herricks. "Will you actually listen to him? I think that's a precondition for judging whether he's a good leader or not. You can't judge him if you don't know anything about him. That would make it a matter of luck who you decided to follow."

He saw Herricks flinch a little, and then smile, as if he appreciated that Harry could turn his own point back on him. He nodded. "All right."

"_Finally_." Draco slapped the map and then jabbed a dark spot, marking a cache, on the northern edge of Muggle London. "There was one here. I think that's the one we should look at."

"Why?" Herricks asked.

Draco flashed Harry a look. Harry squeezed his shoulder again and tried to convey the message he wanted Draco to accept with his eyes. _This is the part where you do have to give explanations. Not everyone knows what goes on inside your head._

After a moment, Draco turned around and nodded sharply. "Because I'm virtually certain that it's one I visited once, when I was taken to meet the Dark Lord for the first time," he said. "I didn't know then, but I put together the clues later. There's no reason that Nihil would take it for his particular base, but _I _know it better, and I'd be able to tell you if there was anything there that I didn't remember being there the first time—anything that might have been added by Nihil in the form of traps."

"If you know that cache, why wasn't it the first one we investigated when we were trying to decide where to go?" Hermione asked.

Draco gave her a haughty, unfocused look. Harry knew that he was trying to look wise and distant, as if he saw more things than were just in the tent. Harry thought it made him look constipated. "Because there was no reason for me to trust you with personal memories at that point," he said. "I didn't know you well enough, and we weren't a comitatus."

Hermione nodded thoughtfully. Harry rolled his eyes. He doubted that was the reason. Draco had probably put together the clues only recently, and didn't want anyone else to know that, because it would destroy his image of "wise leader."

Then again, with the way Herricks was challenging him, perhaps he had more invested in maintaining that image this time.

"Are we going to tell the Aurors about this?" Herricks asked.

"Of course not," Ventus said. "They wouldn't let us go if we did. And we'd have to explain all about the caches and the memories from Snape's Pensieve and what we've done already and the rest of it."

Herricks frowned. "But I thought they knew about most of it. Didn't Harry and Malfoy here make a full confession when they reached the camp a few months ago?"

"Not a full confession," Draco said coolly. Harry was glad that he had something to argue about which Harry didn't have to interfere with. This was in the past, and Herricks could either accept the facts or dispute them uselessly. "We told them what we thought would most help them in developing defensive strategies. But they haven't done that. _We've _done that. They don't need to know about what we're doing now, because Ventus is right. They would try to prevent us from going to the cache out of the sheer belief that we don't know how to do it, because we're younger than they are."

"You don't know that," Herricks said. "There are those you could ask. Hestia Jones; she's younger than the rest. And I notice that Lowell and Weston are closer to the pair of you than to the rest of us."

"That's because they're giving us private lessons in compatible magic," Harry said. "That doesn't mean they're more loyal to us than the Aurors." He leaned forwards, hoping he had found an argument that would get rid of Hericks's obsessive focus on how wrong they all were. "Besides, if they have their way, you'll never see Draco lead in battle and never get to judge whether you want to be a part of the comitatus, because they'll simply take over all the action themselves."

Herricks fell silent and thoughtful, and let them plan the rest of the journey to the cache without interfering. When they were departing the tent, though, he came up to Harry and stared into his face for a long moment.

"What?" Harry asked. He usually had some idea of what Herricks was thinking or about to say, but this time, he didn't, and it unnerved him.

"I wonder," Herricks murmured, "whether you know that other people would be more willing to follow you than Malfoy."

Harry saw Draco's shoulders stiffen ahead of him. He had to work hard not to roll his eyes. He only hoped that Draco wouldn't bitch and snipe about this later, because Harry wasn't the one who had brought it up.

"Yes, I do know that," Harry said, as patiently as he could. "That doesn't mean that I want to indulge their fantasies."

"Fantasies?" Herricks gave him that skeptical look again.

"Their fantasies of following the hero who saved the wizarding world," Harry said. "They think I can be a good leader just because I did that. It doesn't matter. I don't want to, and my particular skill is more in leading a small group of people than anything else—"

Herricks smiled and looked around at the comitatus.

"A small group of people who have a common goal," Harry said patiently. "We don't, yet. You're challenging Draco's fitness for leading, while Ventus only really wants to follow him and fight. My friends still don't completely trust Draco yet. I have to act as peacemaker, and we all question each other's decisions. There's fragmented trust everywhere. I notice that you haven't called Draco by his first name yet, although you're doing it with everyone else in the comitatus. Why?"

"I didn't think it would be polite to call someone I disagreed with by his first name," Herricks said, with a blink.

Harry shook his head. He hadn't even considered that as a motive for Herricks calling Draco Malfoy. "Fine, but maybe you should talk to him directly about this, rather than asking me? I assure you that he's thought about people following me as much as I have. Speak with him more often without yelling at him, and he might be friendlier."

"I don't _yell_," Herricks said, and now he sounded offended.

Harry rolled his eyes and followed Draco out of the tent. He thought—well, he hoped, anyway—that they would become more grounded and compatible as they worked together in the comitatus, but he had little time for someone who twisted his words around.

* * *

Draco ended up going back to their tent alone; Ketchum had ambushed Harry on the way there and told him with a cheerful smile that they were going to practice Tactics physically, since Harry had so much trouble with the written side of it. Harry had groaned and given Draco a pitiful look as he was dragged away, but he'd had no choice but to surrender.

When Draco saw who was waiting for him inside the tent, he was grateful.

"Trainee Malfoy." Holder rose to her feet, eyes fixed so fiercely on him that Draco felt he could have tried to run and it would make no difference. "You must come with me immediately. We have discovered that your partner is conspiring against the Aurors and need your recommendation on how to deal with him."


	13. Draco Thinks On His Feet

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Thirteen—Draco Thinks On His Feet_

"Trainee Malfoy. I am glad you could join us."

Draco ducked through the flap of the tent and nodded to Robards, while he cast his eyes around the interior of the tent in a quick circle to see who else was there. Only Robards, though, sat at the table, and if there was anyone in the corners under a Disillusionment Charm, Invisibility Cloak, or the like, they were too skilled for Draco's swift check to spot them.

Portillo Lopez's words from a month ago, as they labored on the weapon, came back to him. _We must assume that there is a limit to Nihil's power, or we might as well lie down and give up now. If he is omnipotent, after all, there is no way to fight him, no matter how many clever weapons or policies we come up with._

Draco decided to assume the same thing now, that there were no hidden observers. If there were all sorts of them, critically judging him, then he wouldn't be able to please them anyway.

He focused his attention on Robards and said, "Auror Holder said you had uncovered evidence that my partner was plotting against you, sir. What kind of evidence is it?"

Robards gave him a small smile. Draco tried to convince himself that the smile wasn't especially mean just because it was him. He wasn't very successful in that surmise, especially when Robards shook his head and said, "Never mind about the evidence. You need only know that it is conclusive. Now. What are your recommendations?"

Draco clasped his hands behind his back and braced himself. It was a defensive stance, but it had the advantage of not looking like one. "I can't give specific recommendations without knowing what Harry, specifically, has done," he said quietly.

Robards exchanged a glance with Holder. Since Holder was standing behind him and Draco didn't want to turn to see her face, he didn't know what her expression looked like, but he could guess. She was probably telling Robards with her eyes that he was guilty, just like Harry, and his refusal to turn against Harry at once was proof of that.

Draco bit his tongue, hard enough that the shiver of pain ran through most of his body. He needed to stop thinking like that. He needed to stop acting as though there was no way out of this trap and simply _act_.

"It doesn't matter, I told you," Robards said, turning back to Draco. His voice snapped now, and Draco took that as a good sign. Perhaps they'd expected him to break down, and didn't know what to do with him now that he hadn't. "All _you_ need know is that we've reached the point where Potter has to be exiled or killed."

_Exiled or killed. _The words nearly made Draco panic. Was it _that _bad? He knew Harry hadn't done anything that bad consciously, but someone must have seized one of his actions and made it convincing enough for Robards and Holder—

And then Draco stopped himself with a jerk. These were _Robards and Holder. _They'd been trying to find a way to prove that he and Harry were traitors since they'd come to camp. There was no reason to act as though he would be able to rescue Harry if he was only a little bit smarter or a little bit faster.

"The oath that you had us swear," he said. "Does it prevent someone from defecting to Nihil or not? I have to assume it doesn't, if Harry managed to break it and become a traitor anyway. How do you know that other people in the camp aren't becoming traitors right now, as we speak? Perhaps it would be for the best to punish them all at once?"

Robards's features became stone. "He has not broken the oath," he said, sounding as if the words had been forced out of him by a large rock. "It's nothing like that. But he has committed a crime that we must deal with."

Draco raised his eyebrows. "If you could give me even the barest outlines, sir, it would be more information than I possess right now, and that would mean that I could help you better."

Robards cleared his throat. "Trainee Malfoy, you are being nearly as stubborn as Trainee Potter. One might assume that you know of his crime and are determined to conceal it from us and join him in death or exile."

Draco narrowed his eyes. He had not completely lost his patience, but it might be as well to imply that he had. "It sounds as though I'll end up being condemned to it anyway, since I don't know what the right words to speak are. Are you going to give me _any _hints, sir, or just allow me to stumble about like a blindfolded man on a cliff path? Are you going to laugh when I fall?"

Robards leaned back in his chair and regarded him with the same cool expression that he had worn so far. Draco didn't think he was playing by the script that Robards and Holder had expected him to take, though. Perhaps they really _had _thought he would break down and, sobbing, promise them whatever they wanted if they didn't hurt Harry.

"You must realize," Holder said from behind him, in a sudden voice that Draco was sure she meant to make him jump, "that your partner has been withholding information from us, and manipulating us in an attempt to make us respond to his desires. Do you plan to join him in the same actions?"

Draco twisted his head back to look at her now. She had an expression on her face so cold and stern that Draco had no idea if she really believed what she was saying or not. "No," he said. "Then again, I had thought we were forgiven when we told you that we _had _hidden information in the past. Was the forgiveness a sham? Are we going to be punished now for crimes that you said we would receive no punishment for as long as we told you the truth?"

Holder lifted her wand and touched it lightly to the back of Draco's neck. Draco stood still and felt his sweat collect on the smooth wood. "Mr. Malfoy," Holder whispered, "you will work with us or against us, but working with us means doing as you're told. Do you understand?"

Draco inclined his head in a parody of respect, but in reality, he was light-headed from relief. He at last thought he understood what they were doing. He and Harry, with their compatible magic and their knowledge of Nihil and Harry's strange half-necromancy, were too valuable to destroy, but also too valuable to leave running around free. Robards and Holder were trying to make sure that neither Draco nor Harry would turn against them and leave them scrambling, or act as independent agents, because that would also mean they'd lost control.

That was fine. Draco knew how to handle that. He wouldn't have known how to handle someone fanatical enough to really kill him and Harry for their imagined sins, because he would have no idea what code they were operating by.

"If you'll tell us what to do instead of dropping all these hints," he said, "then of course we'll be happy to work with you, Auror."

Holder paused, and her wand vanished from the back of his neck. When she walked around in front of him, Draco saw her narrowed, calculating eyes. He gazed back in a parody of innocence, his eyes so wide that Holder finally shook her head and turned away, one hand spread as though she was discarding something she had thought valuable.

"You must run all your plans past us," she said abruptly. "You must tell us what you intend to do, what you learn about Nihil, and what you learn about his new abilities or about dissent among the trainees."

_We're to be your spies, _Draco translated that, but oddly enough, he didn't mind. After all, he would hardly share _everything _they'd learned, and Robards and Holder wouldn't know that it was partial information, if Draco lied the right way.

Draco did think that he would have to be the one to handle this part of it. Harry wasn't a good enough liar, Granger and Herricks would stammer and blush and make it obvious they were breaking the rules, Weasley would probably give up, and Ventus simply didn't see the need to lie when, as she saw it, they were right and going to win anyway.

"What if something we have to tell you impacts another Auror?" he asked, as though that was his only possible concern.

Robards and Holder exchanged glances. Draco couldn't read a tenth of the information that flowed along that conduit, and had a brief glimpse of the partnership that must have endured between Holder and Robards for years, and of the reasons why they trusted each other so much.

It didn't stop him from wishing that they were both dead, of course.

"Bring the information to us first, in that case," said Robards, with a grand nod that Draco thought was meant to impress him. "And we will decide how to discipline the Auror appropriately. You are not to go against your superiors, Trainee Malfoy, however much you might be tempted to do so. We brought you here to cure you of that habit."

_They've admitted, then, that they never had any evidence that Harry had conspired against them. _Draco wished he could risk a sneer. Robards and Holder might be strong, but they didn't seem to understand much but brute force. There was no attempt to keep their plans from the comprehension of someone who would hate being a victim.

"Very well," said Draco. "What means shall we set up so that Harry and I can contact you with the information we discover?"

Holder gave him a humorless smile. "What makes you think that you will be allowed to tell Trainee Potter what you are doing?"

"What makes you think that he'll react to me with anything but hostility if I lie to him and he finds out?' Draco countered. "Then he would break away from me, and you would lose the benefit of his eyes as well as mine. He would warn his friends against me, and any plans they made would be kept secret from me from then on. It's much better if I bring him in and get him to agree."

Not that Harry would, of course. But Draco thought that particular concept was beyond the grasp of _this _pair.

"Very well," Robards said, sounding as if he were speaking through rocks. "We grant you permission to share what you are doing with him. But _no_ one else, mind. There will be consequences if we discover that you have."

Draco inclined his head.

After that, there were only a few more formalities to be got through before they gave up and let him out of the tent. Draco strode away from the tent with his head held high. There was nothing unusual in that, nothing that would attract the attention of anyone around him. He could ignore the speculative glances that came his way anyway, because he knew they were linked to him emerging from Robards's tent. They might wonder what he had been doing there, but there was no way they could _prove _any of it.

As he went, he considered whether there had been any evidence that Harry was "plotting" in the first place, or whether that had been a pure lie designed to make him cooperate. He thought it was a lie. If the evidence had been real, they would not only have had a stronger threat to hold over Draco, but he thought that they wouldn't have been able to resist at least alluding to it. He would then probably guess what they held and, if it was really damaging, obey them all the more readily. There was no reason for them to say _nothing_ unless the evidence didn't exist.

Draco smiled grimly. Strange, to think that he had once escaped the environment he'd lived in before and during the war by coming into the Aurors. He had imagined that everyone would be open, honest, and working towards the same goals. He had worried about how he would fit into that kind of environment, rather than the one that actually existed.

And maybe Robards and Holder were like that with the other trainees and Aurors. But since they distrusted Harry and Draco so much, it didn't matter. Draco had to live with the attitude they gave him, not the hypothetical attitude they might have used if he wasn't a former Death Eater and Harry Potter's partner.

* * *

"I'm growing worried about you, Trainee Potter."

Harry glanced up. He was breathing so hard—Ketchum had been chasing him around the hills and using stones and small shrubs that Harry wouldn't have thought could be obstacles _as _obstacles—that he couldn't get his voice back to reply for a long moment. Ketchum seemed to understand and sat down beside him on the grass, staring into the camp. Then he twisted his head around and considered the sentries on the further hills.

"Why, sir?" Harry asked finally. "I just think that I don't listen very well and do better when I have a practical lesson in front of me. I did well now, didn't I?" He sounded defensive and hated it. That was the way he had sounded when the Dursleys were yelling at him for not doing his chores perfectly.

"Hmmm?" Ketchum turned around. "Oh. I didn't mean that. You'll catch up in my class with a bit of practice, and I haven't heard awful things about you from the other instructors. But you're continually in conflict with the Head Auror and his She-Wolf."

"She-Wolf?" Harry repeated. He hadn't heard anyone use the name so far, though he knew who it meant as once.

Ketchum grinned and nodded. "I wondered if you knew why they were going after you. Anger that you withheld information in the past? Which wasn't the smartest thing to do, by the way," he added in cooler tones. "Or did you do something since you came into the camp to anger them specifically?"

Harry buried his head in his arms as he thought a moment. He didn't think he should admit anything private to Ketchum. He could still be a spy for Holder and Robards. And Draco might say that they couldn't trust Ketchum at all.

But this sounded an awful lot, to Harry, like someone making an offer of alliance, if they would take it. And it would be nice to have _one _older Auror who would stick up for them, since most of them didn't want to listen to trainees.

Harry took a deep breath and looked up. "Mostly I think it's withholding information," he admitted. "But it's also our power."

"Hmmm?" Ketchum asked again. He bent nearer, his dark face creased with concentration. Harry looked at him for a minute more in silence, then shrugged. He'd already crossed the line by mentioning this at all. If it was wrong, then he and Draco would find a way to make it right later.

"Well," Harry said, "we have compatible magic. Draco has his name and the power of that walking around with him, as well as what he did during the war. There's what _I _did during the war. There's the way that we've fought Nihil multiple times and survived where no one else did. And we've been partners for more than a year now. So, together, we scare them. I think that's why they've been trying to control us or turn us against each other since we arrived here. They have to control the power we represent."

Ketchum remained quiet this time for some moments, rubbing his chin. Harry winced. Had he said the wrong thing after all?

Hermione had asked him once why he didn't try making inspirational speeches, because people would listen to the hero who had destroyed Voldemort. This was exactly why. Harry never knew if he was going to say the right thing before he said it, and then he worried about whether it was wrong after he spoke.

"I think you're right," Ketchum said.

Harry knew his jaw was sagging and that Draco would probably scold him for looking stupid, but that was how he felt at the moment. An Auror was _agreeing _with him instead of violently disagreeing and suggesting that he was a dumb little trainee and needed to learn more before he said anything?

"But—why?" he asked at last, weakly enough that Ketchum gave him a sideways, exasperated look.

"Aurors aren't incapable of recognizing common sense when it's hitting them in the face," Ketchum said dryly. "Yes, I think that Robards and Holder fear you. Yes, I think that they feel that, if they can't control you, someone else will, because they don't trust you to do it yourself. The thought of trusting you doesn't occur to them." He leaned nearer, his voice so low that Harry thought someone standing right behind them wouldn't be able to hear it—which was the point, he reckoned. "Well, I can tell you there are some Aurors who are getting tired of Robards and Holder spending more time trying to crush you than fighting Nihil."

Harry stared at him. Ketchum gave him a solemn wink, a nod, and then stood up and walked towards the edge of the hill.

"Wait!" Harry said, scrambling after him. "If that's true, why haven't I heard about it before now? Why haven't _we_ heard about it?" He could see how hints might pass unnoticed in front of him, but Draco or Hermione should have picked up on them. "And why haven't you done something before?"

Ketchum glanced back at him with a smile. "Because Aurors are stubborn and contentious, and not all of us trust you either," he said simply. "It's taking a while to wear down the ones who are tired of Robards and Holder but also want to just ignore you and fight Nihil by ourselves. But it's working."

Then he walked on as if deaf, and nothing Harry could say or shout would distract him.

* * *

"That bitch."

Draco smiled. He had told Harry about what Holder did when she was trying to make Draco turn against him, and Harry had immediately got angry. It was nice to have someone who agreed with his estimate of the situation.

"Do you think she's rational?" Harry was pacing back and forth in the center of their tent, his hand scraping through his hair. "I mean, does she see things that she could identify as treasonous and decide that they are? Or do you think that she just makes things up out of thin air, with no justification? I think she's hard to fight either way, but the first way might be harder."

"She's rational," Draco murmured, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes. His mind still whirled with the possibilities of coming up with a plan that would defeat Holder, but a large part of him was also occupied with analyzing the meeting, now that Harry was there to talk about it with and while it was still fresh in his memory. "She wouldn't have understood what I was talking about so fast and been able to come up with the plan to make us spy for her if she wasn't. She was willing to abandon her suspicions about us when she saw that she could do so with an advantage."

"Well, when she _thought_ she could do so with an advantage." Harry came to a halt in front of his chair. "Should we tell the rest of the comitatus?"

Draco opened one lazy eye. "Tell me that that would be a good idea, when we have several people who would be inclined to confront Holder just on principle."

Harry grimaced. "No, I suppose it wouldn't." He turned away and prowled in a restless circle, again touching his hair. "But I don't know how we can keep frequent visits to Holder and Robards from them."

"We visit the command tent during times when we know that the rest are working on being better partners," Draco said. "Lowell and Weston have already said that we don't need to attend those practices."

Harry stopped walking at once and smiled at him. "You think of everything."

Draco smiled modestly back. "I try."

Harry snorted and pushed against his shoulder as he walked back, past Draco's chair. "What do you think about Ketchum's claim that some of the Aurors are willing to turn against Robards and Holder? Do you think that they would be valuable allies? Could they even be persuaded to work with us? Maybe Ketchum would be willing to treat us like adults, but that says nothing about the rest of them."

"There was the Fellowship," Draco pointed out, to see what Harry would say to that.

Harry snorted again. "What did the Fellowship accomplish? A few meetings and a lot of chatter, and a few protections against Nihil that turned out not to matter because Dearborn was part of the group the entire time." He flung himself down in the chair across from Draco and put his hands in his robe pockets. "I don't think we can use the Fellowship as a model. We would have to work together as part of a fighting group, something like a bigger comitatus, rather than a Gobstones club."

Draco smiled. That was another speech Harry never would have made a year ago. It was nice to see that Draco was having an effect on him. "Holder and Robards would be frightened at the thought of us working with Aurors that way."

"Which is why we should do it." Harry grinned at him.

Draco did roll his eyes this time. "When we're pretending to be their allies? We'll have to hide it better, that's all. And if they would work with us, I still don't think that they would work under our leadership. Let them fight commanded by Ketchum or whoever the actual leader is, and the rest of the comitatus can fight under me."

"Yes, they can," Harry said. "We can." He stood up and sauntered over to Draco's chair, a casual smile on his face that fooled Draco not at all.

Draco arched his neck back and accepted the heated kiss, as he accepted the way Harry sank to his knees a moment later and began to unfasten his trousers. They might not have done as much towards coming up with a plan to invade the cache near London today as he had originally wanted, but they had done enough that he felt justified in accepting his reward.


	14. Memories and Nightmares

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Fourteen—Memories and Nightmares_

"_Memoria arboris._"

The incantation caused a spiral of yellow light to take form around the table he was touching his wand to. Harry sighed. He hoped it was the right spell this time. One reason the spells to read objects' memories were hard was that the second word of the incantation had to change to reflect what kind of object one was talking about. He thought he had used the right word to read something made of wood, but he wasn't sure.

The yellow light turned the color of an old bruise as it sank into the table. Then it came back up and lay on the surface of the wood like a shimmering liquid. Harry frowned and tapped it with his wand, wondering if he needed to push it into the table.

The liquid became light again and rose up in front of him like a snake that was considering a bite. Harry found himself instinctively forming his lips for Parseltongue and had to shake off the impulse. He waited, and the yellow light waited and swayed, and then ducked into his wand and ran up his arm.

Harry closed his eyes. Images were coming to life in his head—cloudy images, but he would take that over the absolute lack of response any of the other times that he had performed the spell. They had to do _something _with these spells soon, or Draco would start hinting that he should make his mind similar to Nihil's again. He already looked as though he was thinking of it at times.

The image that came to life didn't make sense at first, because it looked like a brown wall. Harry frowned. _Was Draco thinking of Malfoy Manor in some really strange light when he sat here?_

The perspective seemed to pull back from the object a bit, and Harry finally made out a slab of beef lying on a plate. Or, at least, the plate was clear. The food on it could have been almost anything, from beef to half a sandwich. But it was more than Harry had ever seen before, and it made sense that Draco would be hungry; he'd left this memory right before breakfast.

Harry opened his eyes and gave a small smile. He was making progress in the less complicated type of object-reading, then: what people had been thinking about when they touched the objects. He still hadn't attempted the more complicated kind, where the objects would tell you everything that had happened in their immediate area at a certain time, like memories in a Pensieve. But he was getting there.

"Harry? Can I talk to you?"

Harry whirled around, and then relaxed. He and Draco had modified the wards the other day so that they would sound an alarm if someone tried to enter besides a member of the comitatus. If this was Holder, Robards, or any of the other Auror instructors, Harry would have been warned long before they get close enough to duck in.

_And they wouldn't have called you "Harry_," he thought, as his brain caught up with his ears. He dragged a chair over for Hermione and looked at her expectantly as she sat down in it. "Sure, Hermione. What's the matter?" he added.

Hermione certainly looked as if _something _was the matter. Her hair straggled around her face, and she had obviously stood up and come straight here without bothering to do more than maybe splash water on her cheeks. Maybe not even that, Harry thought, watching her as she leaned back and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes.

"I've been having dreams," Hermione said, clasping her hands tight. "Dreams that leave me feeing horrible and like I'm drifting in the dark. It's so hard to wake up from them, and afterwards, nothing feels quite real." She stared at him, and Harry was shocked to see that she was trembling. It seemed the dreams had scared her more than she was letting on. "I'm afraid they have some connection to Nihil, and I thought I'd come to you and tell you, since you're the most experienced with visions of him."

Harry knelt down in front of her and peered into her eyes. He was half-waiting for a reaction, as had sometimes happened when he looked into mirrors and received a flicker of a vision in response, but there was nothing more than Hermione staring at him, tired and heartsick and hopeful.

"I don't know if the dreams are connected to Nihil just from your description of them," Harry said slowly. "What do you dream about?"

"Darkness, most of the time," Hermione said, and shuddered, her arms wrapping around herself. Harry hugged her and found that she was still shaking, her skin colder than it should be and covered with sweat. "I feel like a corpse that someone is picking apart limb by limb. I dreamed that I was in light last night, but all that changed was that I could _see _it happening. They took me apart from the feet up until there was nothing left." Her voice became a wavering thread and then stopped.

"I'm sorry," Harry said gently. "That does sound horrible, and it sounds like it's probably Nihil. If he can't get through to me anymore, or he's afraid to try, then he might turn around and start inflicting dreams like that on some other member of the comitatus."

Hermione nodded. Her eyes were shut tight, as if keeping them that way would also keep her from having to have the dreams again. "But what can I _do_ about it?"

Harry hesitated for a moment. Then he decided that tactics which hadn't worked for him might well work for Hermione, since she had more patience and discipline. And even if the visions he used to have from Voldemort were visions and not dreams, they still came at night and were indistinguishable from dreams for a long time.

"Do you remember when I was trying to learn Occlumency?" he asked. "I don't think I can teach you it," he added, when Hermione's eyes popped open. "But I know one of the basic techniques. Clear your mind every night before you go to sleep. Try to think of nothing. Snape thought that was the key to me being free of Voldemort, and our connection probably ran deeper than any connection that Nihil's managed to establish to you so far. Try that for a while, and then we'll see what we can do, if Draco has a book on Occlumency."

Hermione hugged him hard enough to make him rock on his feet. Harry patted her back and darted a look at the flap of the tent, hoping that no one would walk in and see them like this. Then Harry would have either a jealous Draco to deal with or rumors that might do as much damage.

"Thank you," Hermione whispered. "Oh, _thank_ you. I knew you would have the answer." She pulled back and smiled at him. "I think this one of the reasons that Herricks and I have so much trouble accepting Malfoy as leader. He wouldn't have come up with a solution like this."

"Oh, I think he would," Harry said. "He knows Occlumency. But he wouldn't have been as nice about it."

"And that's what I need," Hermione said, nodding. "Someone to be nice about it, not just someone who can tell me what's wrong and how to fix it."

Harry could do nothing but offer her a weak smile. They both knew that Draco wasn't about to start being nice, especially to someone he still thought was trying to take Harry's attention away from him.

Hermione left with a smile on her face, and Harry went back to trying to read the table's memory. He would have practiced with some of the other incantations, but Draco had the list, and, shamefully, Harry couldn't remember most of them.

Then he turned around and looked at the chair Hermione had been sitting on. It was made of wood, too, and it would have a strong image since Hermione had been there just now, not hours before.

Harry barely hesitated before he crossed over, tapped his wand against the chair, and murmured, "_Memoria arboris._"

Once again he had to wait while the yellow light sank into the chair, returned as liquid, and then rose up in front of him. He thought it went a little faster this time, and it definitely went faster when the liquid lashed forwards and sank into him, flooding his mind with clear, sharp images.

The images were as horrible as Hermione had said they were. She floated in darkness, tears running down her face, while her bones separated from her body one by one under the influence of invisible pincers. Draco would have had to feel sorry for her if he'd seen this, Harry thought, gagging.

But he watched the dream all the way through until he got to the point when Hermione couldn't cry anymore because her eyes were gone, and then he looked up, gasping, and dropped his wand on the chair.

"What's the matter?"

Draco was there. Harry hadn't heard him come in. He was staring at Harry as if he thought he'd have to defend him, his hand on his own wand, his eyes darting into the corners of the tent when Harry sat there, stunned and speechless.

"It was—a memory that the chair gave me," Harry said, and swallowed. He wondered if he would be betraying Hermione's confidence by talking about her dream to Draco, but since she was a member of the comitatus and they would have to ask to borrow the Occlumency books Draco might have, he didn't think so. "Hermione came and sat here while she told me about nightmares that she thinks comes from Nihil. Then I saw the nightmare when I cast the spell that lets me read the memory of wood." He shuddered.

Draco crossed over to him, a frown running over his face. "And you think it really comes from Nihil? Why?"

Harry told him the details and the feeling of cold that the dream had conveyed when he saw it, which wasn't something that Hermione could really get across to him. "Plus, she's had it more than once," he ended. "I don't think that she would have a reason to obsessively repeat the same dream over and over on her own."

"It _could _happen," Draco said, eyes half-closed and fingers stroking the back of the chair as if he could absorb the same memory himself. "But most of the time, cases like that mean someone outside your head has cast a curse on you."

"Do you think he targeted her because she's part of the comitatus?" Harry asked quietly. He was beginning to wonder if it wouldn't have been a better thing for him to contact Nihil instead of Hermione having to suffer those dreams.

_But he probably would have sent them anyway, _Harry told himself after a moment's consideration. _After all, the whole point of reaching out to him would be to keep him from knowing I was doing it, and these dreams seem to be a separate plan._

"That would be the most likely scenario," Draco said. "Which means he might target the rest of us. I reckon we should speak to Herricks and Ventus and Weasley as soon as possible." He was frowning so hard that Harry thought he would leave permanent lines in his face. "I hadn't considered he might strike back at us this way. I don't know why."

"I do," Harry said. "Why should he? He's favored physical strikes so far, and he has more enemies than the six of us. It would make more sense to attack the Auror camps and possibly manage to kill lots of people, rather than try to drive one person crazy."

"I wonder if his tactics have changed," Draco said, his head falling back as he leaned against the table. He looked half deep in thought and half-asleep. Harry hid a smile just in case Draco opened his eyes and thought Harry was laughing at him. "Or what he wants. What _does _he want, anyway?"

"That's the question that we're going to answer when we all master the spells that can read the memories of objects and go investigate the London Death Eater cache," Harry said firmly. "We should work on that before Hermione's dreams if we can't come up with a good strategy to use against them."

"Occlumency should work," Draco said, with a dismissive flip of his hand. "I'm more worried about what these dreams indicate about Nihil's larger strategies."

Harry nodded without explaining that the Occlumency would hardly be unimportant to Hermione, and held out his hand. "I've pretty much mastered the wood. You were thinking about breakfast when you sat at the table this morning, and Hermione was thinking about the dream when she sat in the chair. Where is the list of the rest of the incantations?"

Draco raised his eyebrows, and left them there. He stayed still so long that Harry began to flush. "What?" he snapped. "I saw the nightmare, and there's no way I could have imagined it; it was too horrible. Did I somehow read the memory you left wrong? I couldn't see what kind of food it was, but—"

"I was thinking about fucking you," Draco said. "Not about food."

Harry started to sag, but then remembered something Weston had said about these spells the other day. "But fucking me couldn't have been the _only_ thought in your head," he said triumphantly. "If you were sitting here for an hour or more, which you were, you would have others. I just picked up on one of the others instead of the memory that you meant to leave for me."

"But the fucking was the strongest one," Draco said, folding his arms. "We have to be able to pick up the strongest memories, the ones bonded to the objects by emotion, because those will be the most important ones. Don't be distracted by the weak images that you get. Try again with wood before I let you have the list of incantations." He put both hands on the table and closed his eyes. "Try to read the memory that I'll leave here for you right now. Trust me, it's a strong one."

Harry gritted his teeth and leaned back in the chair to wait. But he was already planning to steal the list when Draco wasn't looking and copy the incantations. At least he could know the spells, even if he had to wait a while to master them all.

* * *

"I haven't had any odd dreams," Weasley said, and Ventus and Herricks both shook their heads simultaneously. Granger just clasped her hands in her lap and looked haunted, which Draco could understand if the dreams were as bad as she'd said.

"I've had none that I remember," Harry said.

Draco nodded. He could believe Harry, because they slept close enough together that he would have noted any moaning or thrashing—well, any extra moaning or thrashing that he didn't cause himself.

The problem was that he didn't know if he could trust the others. Ventus wouldn't consciously lie to him, but she might have the dreams and shrug them off because so little ever hurt or frightened her. Weasley and Herricks would lie on principle, because they might think that their dreams made them look weak, or they might not want Draco in possession of that much knowledge about them. And that made for another division in the comitatus, more distrust and Draco having to wonder if Nihil was gaining a foothold among them.

On the other hand, Granger's nightmares were too strong and too constant for it to be a subtle means of gaining a foothold in her mind, and they seemed to be responding well to Occlumency. It was as though this was an afterthought for Nihil, Draco decided, something he had tried to see if it would work, but not something that would concern him greatly if it failed.

That made it all the more imperative for them to find out exactly what he was _really _doing, what was consuming all his attention.

"Fine," Draco said, pretending to believe the rest of them for the moment. "How much progress are you making in the object-reading spells?"

"I can read stone, wood, and most kinds of metal," said Herricks, with what Draco thought was justifiable pride. Assuming that he was telling the truth, of course.

Draco mentally rolled his eyes at himself. _Maybe that's Nihil's real tactic. To try to make us doubt each other, when in reality we're telling the truth, and tear ourselves apart from the inside with that distrust._

"I can't read anything," Ventus said, and only raised an eyebrow when Draco glared at her. "It's not offensive magic."

Which meant that she wouldn't be good at it—or else that she wouldn't put in the time and study necessary to make herself good at it. Draco had seen her do remarkable things on the battlefield, but that didn't tell him whether she was really only good at battle magic, as she claimed, or whether she was only _interested _in battle magic and would neglect other areas of study without thinking.

"I can perform most of the incantations on the list," Granger said, which was no surprise to Draco. He also thought she was telling the truth; she had always been honest, even when the honesty was on the point of not liking him or thinking he was plotting against Harry and the rest. He nodded and turned to Weasley.

Weasley flushed and stared at his hands.

"Well?" Draco asked, when he thought enough time had gone past to give Weasley the chance to answer fairly on his own.

"I can read wood," Weasley murmured. "It's like it responds more strongly to me than most other people. But I can't read stone or any metal or cloth. The incantation burns away into the material, but it doesn't come back."

Draco clenched his teeth. Weston and Lowell had warned them about that, as well: that some people would be better at reading certain kinds of object memory, but that the price to be paid for their skill was an extreme incapacity in other kinds of reading. He could have wished that they wouldn't have an idiot-genius like that in the comitatus, that was all.

"Fine," he said. "Then we need to choose a time to leave when the rest of the instructors will be occupied and unable to stop us."

"What about after that second demonstration of the new weapons tomorrow?" Herricks suggested. "Everyone's going to be tired after that, or at least on edge, and more preoccupied with themselves. And they've promised that we can have the afternoon off from classes."

The suggestion was a good one, Draco thought reluctantly, as much as he would have preferred that someone else propose it. Gregory, Portillo Lopez, and Holder had all been disappointed with the first performance of the weapons, because too many of the trainees were still nervous and hadn't done well. They'd insisted that the trainees return to their normal classwork, but also continue to practice with the weapons until they could arrange another demonstration.

"Yes, all right," he said, and then looked rapidly around the rest of the comitatus, almost hoping that someone else would come up with an objection that hadn't occurred to him. "Well?"

"That sounds like it would work," Weasley said. Ventus nodded and sent Herricks a proud look that made Draco's throat curdle. It wasn't that he was _jealous_, of course not, but Ventus had been the first to believe in him as a leader, and he could have used that undivided support at the moment.

"As long as we're careful," Granger said. "I don't think Holder would take it kindly if we sneaked out of the camp so soon after using a weapon like that. She might think we were going after Nihil again."

"We are," Harry said, "sort of."

"But we aren't going to fight," Granger said, giving Harry a sharp look, as if she assumed that the technical correction would mean he was disagreeing. And of course no one could disagree with the mighty Granger and survive, Draco thought, at least not without her nagging. "We'll just read the object memories."

"And battle any traps that Nihil might have left there," Draco said. He had to admit that he was looking forwards to that part, and hoped Nihil had left some. It would use up some of the nervous energy that was bubbling up and down in his veins, unable to be used until they figured out what Nihil was up to.

"Yes," Granger said, and smoothed her hands down her robes in a prim fashion. "But that's not the same thing as saying that we're going to fight him."

Draco sighed and let it go. He could have used a smoothly working comitatus that would all trust and love and believe in him as Harry did, but he wasn't going to get that. He would have to use the weapons that came to hand.

When the other had left, Harry remained in the center of the tent, turning his wand over in his hands. Draco watched him as he went to sit on the bed. Harry usually only looked like that when he had something to discuss but wasn't sure how Draco would take it.

"Well?" Draco asked finally. He had an essay to write for Ketchum, and that meant he couldn't wait for the rest of the evening for Harry to speak.

Harry started as though he had forgotten there was anyone else in the tent and looked up. "Hermione told me that the Occlumency didn't work for the last few nights," he said quietly. "The dreams have returned, and they're worse now. She thinks that Nihil is using her bones to build something. Sometimes it's a throne, sometimes it's a machine that she thinks looks like a Muggle machine, but it's always a weapon that he intends to use against us."

"He can't really be doing that," Draco said. "Why would he be stupid enough to advertise his intentions like that?"

"Perhaps he doesn't know that she can remember and sense the dreams," Harry suggested, but shook his head when Draco gave him a harsh look. "No, I don't believe that, either. He probably would have felt it when she tried to use Occlumency, at least. But what does it _mean_? Hermione might become tired and off-balance when she's trying to fight him, but it's not as though that would affect the rest of us."

"It might if she turns against us," Draco said quietly.

Harry jerked his head up and stared for a minute. Then he said, "But that has the same objection against it as him really building a weapon out of her dream-bones. It would be much better and subtler if we didn't know that he was getting into her mind. And what about the oath we swore?" he added suddenly. "It would react against her if he managed to make her into a traitor that way, no matter how unwilling it was."

Draco sighed. "Nihil's biggest weapon has always been our lack of knowledge," he said wearily. "We don't really understand him, and he uses that against us at every turn. He also makes us spend our time worrying about nothing and jumping at shadows. I don't think we can say, yet, what he intends with this, and that means trying to help Granger and otherwise not worrying about it."

Harry stepped over to him and kissed him hard, then leaned his head on Draco's shoulder and put his arms around him. "Sometimes I think that we're not going to win this war," he whispered.

Draco said nothing, contenting himself with a fierce embrace, but Harry's words could have been his own.


	15. Slices of Memory

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_Chapter Fifteen—Slices of Memory_

"You have everything you need?"

"That's the sixth time you've asked us that," Herricks said, a snarl in the back of his voice. "Yes. We do."

Draco turned his head away from Herricks and continued his survey of the comitatus, who were gathered together in his and Harry's tent, not deeming it worth his while to respond to Herricks's accusation. Ventus was the calmest as Herricks was the most tense, and she touched her hand to the butt of her blue-black weapon and smiled when Draco looked at her. Harry stood on the other side of the tent, shoving a few crumpled pieces of parchment in his pocket—the lists of incantations for reading object-memories, Draco reckoned. Granger and Weasley stood close together, their heads bowed and their lips moving. Draco couldn't hear what they were saying to each other, and he didn't care.

"Come on, then," Draco said, and clapped his hands. Granger and Weasley jumped and nearly bumped heads, Harry spun around, and Herricks glared. Draco shrugged and made his way out of the tent, peering cautiously through the flap first.

The camp seemed quiet. Most of the trainees had retreated to their tents in exhaustion the moment the instructors had said they could go, and the Aurors themselves were also sleeping or holding private meetings. Draco smiled and turned to gesture at the rest of the comitatus before he cast a Disillusionment Charm on himself.

The others followed suit, and Draco hoped they walked as lightly as possible while they made their way across the grass towards the hills. No one glanced at them, at least, even the rare trainee sitting outside his or her tent to enjoy the weak sunshine. Draco didn't think they were as silent as they could have been, with Herricks grumbling constantly, but apparently that was easy to mistake for the crush of the grass and the whisper of the wind.

The wards passed over them with a sharp snapping sound, and Draco breathed more easily. He still kept the comitatus moving, however, until the camp was out of sight. All they needed now was for someone to spot them just as they were about to Apparate to the cache.

When he released his own Disillusionment Charm, the others followed suit, and Weasley and Granger started whispering again. Draco rolled his eyes. "Stop it," he told them. "It's too late to back out now."

"You're our leader, Malfoy, not our god," Weasley snapped. "We were just making sure that we had the Apparition coordinates correct."

"If one of you doesn't, then the one who does should Side-Along Apparate the other," Draco said coolly, and watched the blush roll over Weasley's face. Yes, he'd thought he'd be able to guess which of them that was. He looked at Ventus and Herricks. "Do both of _you_ know, or do you need a reminder?"

"We'll manage," said Herricks, and gave him a tight little smile. Draco turned away with a shake of his head, only hoping that they wouldn't regret bringing him into the comitatus, and held out his arm.

Harry joined him, taking his elbow in a firm grip that told Draco he was afraid of being jolted off. Well, why not? That was a reasonable thing to be afraid of, unlike the idea that Draco would mysteriously turn out to be evil, or whatever it was that Herricks was afraid of.

Draco paused one moment more to collect everyone with his eyes. "When we get there, we should be just outside the entrance of the cache," he said quietly. "Don't move at first, unless someone or something attacks you immediately. I want to find out what we're dealing with, and it's easier to isolate wards when you don't have distractions."

"So now we're distractions," Herricks muttered.

Draco shook his head and Apparated, concentrating on the strong, confident way Harry held him to avoid the temptation to answer.

They appeared in a tunnel, a place with cracked stone walls and the lingering sour odor that Draco tended to associate with Muggle machines. As the others arrived with sharp cracks behind him, Draco craned his neck back and looked for the telltale glow of active wards. Harry, he knew, would be reaching out carefully and trying to sense the cold presence of any of the living dead Nihil might have left on guard.

Nothing happened, nothing sounded, nothing glowed. Draco nodded in satisfaction and cast one of the charms he had learned from the library at Malfoy Manor that would tell him, or should tell him, of the presence of spells with hostile intent. Those should be traps, though some of them might be dormant wards.

The charm appeared as smoke, which moved ahead of them and then outlined three jagged shapes towards the entrance. Draco dropped to one knee so that he could examine them better. The nearest was only three feet from them, but stood much lower than they were.

"Are we going to fight anyone?" Ventus whispered behind him.

"That's what I'm trying to figure out," Draco said in a calm, absent voice that he knew would soothe her impatience for the moment. Then he reached out and caressed the air a foot from the trap, waiting to see what would happen. The smoke he had caused to reveal it eddied and shook and danced, but the trap didn't move. Draco nodded. That told him it was designed to activate only when someone touched it. Most hostile spells would be triggered by someone passing that close to them.

"Herricks, raise a defensive spell," he said, without looking over his shoulder to see if the idiot would do it or not. "Ventus, forwards. We're going to destroy this trap." He did look over his shoulder to catch Harry's eye. "Harry, can you sense any of the dead?"

Harry said, "No. But I can sense _something _ahead of us in the cache." He was leaning forwards on the balls of his feet, Draco saw, and his eyes were narrowed as if he was listening to a sound in a distant room. "It may be no more than signs of Nihil's presence. He's so strong that he could be obscuring the other things I'd feel."

"Nihil is here?" Draco asked, because Herricks was gasping and he thought it prudent to be absolutely clear.

"No, sorry," Harry said, blushing as if it was reasonable that he wouldn't have let them know about Nihil actually being here at once. "Just that he once was, and I can feel that. But it's like a pungent smell. Maybe there really are flowers under the reek of rotten food, but you'd have a hard time smelling them."

Draco nodded, cast a triumphant glance at Herricks—who at least looked properly irritated, which was a step on the road to being properly ashamed—and waited until a shield shimmered into being around them. Then he nodded to Ventus, who was crouching beside him. "Do what you need to."

Ventus whistled happily as she aimed her wand under the edge of the shield, where Herricks had left a gap for her, and closed her eyes. Then her wand shook and a spell that looked like ball lightning leaped from it.

Once it was free, the lightning drifted over to the trap more slowly than Draco had expected. He found himself tensing the closer it came, though, and it was a good thing that he was prepared for a spectacular result when they clashed.

A wash of light illuminated the tunnel, harsh and bright and growing stronger. Draco dropped back and squinted under the shelter of his hand, unwilling to give up looking until the very last moment he had to.

The trap, or rather the outline of smoke that marked the trap, was fighting with the lightning, which surrounded it and ate inwards. Fat sparks leaped off and cracked against Herricks's shield. Ventus was laughing, and had added another spot of lightning to the proceedings. This one attacked from under the trap, and for a moment Draco thought he saw a glimpse of the trap writhing in pain like a living creature.

Then the light burst outwards in a starry dazzle. Draco could hear a shriek, cut short, and felt a brief sensation on his head as though a string had passed over it. Then the darkness returned, accompanied by the sound of Ventus's laughter.

Draco licked his stinging lips and lowered his hand. The outline of smoke was gone, but the other two traps waited for them, and Draco had to wonder if it would require as much effort to destroy each of them. Not that Ventus looked tired, or at all unwilling to do it again. At a gesture from Herricks, she rose and walked down the tunnel behind the automatically extending edge of his shield.

Draco shot a glance at Harry. He was looking impressed, along with Weasley, while Granger frowned and scribbled at a scroll of parchment that she was—of course—carrying with her. Herricks simply strode on, an expression of fierce concentration on his face.

_We might make a winning combination after all, _Draco thought, and followed Ventus.

* * *

Harry hated the way the cache felt. It wasn't anything visible, but a silent smoke that seemed to creep into every pore, a laughing cold that gripped and froze the vulnerable parts of his brain. He was amazed that the others could walk through it without being affected, but perhaps it only registered for someone who, like him, was "lucky" enough to have practiced necromancy.

Nihil had been here.

Of course, the traps said that, and Draco and Hermione had begun to chant the spells that would give them the memories of the chairs, the walls, the floor, and the broken bits of equipment and books scattered here and there. Herricks was working with the scraps of cloth lying about, since he was good at that, and keeping up moving shields. Ventus prowled around in search of an enemy to smite. Ron took the wooden furniture, his forehead worked into a scowl, as if he was determined to drag the memories out.

Harry still hadn't mastered the full list of incantations, but more than that, the coldness and the smoke weighed upon him. He didn't want to speak. He didn't want to stand still _or _move, but motion was slightly better. He turned in circles, staring into corners and waiting for a source of the danger to manifest itself.

There was nothing there. Only the sense of Nihil, repeated over and over. Harry knew he must have visited the cache many times. Doubtfully, he decided that that was something Draco might like to know, and moved towards him, ready to speak the next time he came out of a memory trance.

Then something made Harry turn his head. He could have described it as the invisible smoke curling around his neck and wrenching his head sideways, if he wanted to, but he didn't think he would want to. The longer he thought about what he was experiencing, the more he decided that it wouldn't make sense to anyone else.

A bit of the stone wall nearby projected outwards. Harry knew that Hermione and Draco had already been over it and located no interesting memory, because they would have exclaimed aloud. But it drew him anyway. He walked over to the projection and lifted his hands, fingers all spread out, to touch the edge of the lip.

He didn't know what made him spread his fingers out like that, either. He could have said that an unheard voice was whispering to him, but he _really _didn't want to do that.

The curled projection quivered and trembled beneath his touch as if made of pudding. Then it melted and ran down the wall, and Harry stumbled forwards as the stone opened in front of him. The others turned around, because Harry thought he had given an embarrassing, strangled cry, but he caught his balance before he could require help.

Behind the wall was a small chamber, more a scoop in the rock than a room, which Harry took in at a glance. Then he gasped, because the invisible smoke practically steamed from the stone here.

There were scorch marks in the stone, oddly plated with black and shining metal. There was a mark like the huge, clawed footprint of a creature that must have been able to score the wall itself. Harry wondered if Nihil had summoned one of the dead races of magical creatures here. According to Portillo Lopez, some necromancers could do that. Or perhaps this was the mark of one of Nemo's beasts.

And in the center of the chamber was something that Harry's eyes slid away from. No matter how hard he tried to focus on it, he couldn't. He had the vague impression that it was shaped like a sphere, but no more than that.

"Does anyone else see that thing?" he demanded, pointing at it with one finger, as best he could when his eyes insisted on going elsewhere. "What _is _it?"

* * *

Draco put a hand on Harry's back and decided that his questions, such as what had made Harry able to discover this chamber when the rest of them were stumbling about like novices, could wait for later. He was too occupied with the thing that _did _float in the center of the chamber, and what it meant.

It was a ball, or Draco thought it was; he had to squint with one eye in order to see it, and that wasn't very reliable. A ball that looked black at some times, and other times like it had no color. A ball of pure nothingness.

Draco thought that was what it was, at least. A slice of void. A slice of something that couldn't _be_.

Fear coiled through him like a rushing river. He turned away from the nothingness ball for a moment and focused on Harry. "How did you find this place?" he asked gently. He'd seen Harry wandering about in the background when he wasn't involved in the dull memories of the walls and floor that had seen Death Eaters come and go, but he had assumed that he was simply seeking a material to read that no one else was reading. He hadn't thought he was on the brink of a discovery like _this_.

"There's the sense of Nihil's presence that I told you about," Harry whispered. "I can feel it better than anyone else, probably because I've practiced necromancy myself. It gets into my eyes and ears and nostrils. It showed me where I needed to touch, and the position that my hands needed to be in when I did it." He shivered and shut his eyes tightly. "It's not—I don't think I'm going mad, Draco. But that's what happened."

Draco pressed his hand tightly to the middle of Harry's back and said nothing. He would keep that confession, which no one else had heard because they were all too busy staring at the ball of nothingness, to himself for the moment. He knew that Harry wasn't going mad; this wasn't the strangest thing that had happened since they started fighting Nihil. But Herricks might think so.

"What does this mean, though?" Herricks was turning his head from side to side, scanning the chamber, his eyes fixed on the marks in the stone. "So he brought a bit of space into the world. Or is it a gate that leads elsewhere? Is that the problem, that he might do necromancy in another world and we wouldn't be able to find him?"

Granger met Draco's gaze bleakly. He nodded. She had come to the same conclusions and felt the same fear. Harry might, too, but for the moment his head was buried in Draco's shoulder and he was concentrating on fighting off Nihil's influence. Granger raised an eyebrow, and Draco nodded again. If she wanted to be the one who explained it, that was a role he would willingly resign to her.

"It means that Nihil has discovered the means to make everything into nothing," Granger said softly, gesturing at the ball. "That's what he wants to do, to reduce the world and everything into it to nothing and less than nothing, so that he can forget about his pain. He's transformed, able to move past and beyond death, but that means that he can't die and escape, either. He wants to escape."

Herricks stared at them in horror. Draco was grimly amused to note that at least he could react to _that _news the proper way.

"One thing I don't understand, then," Herricks said, his eyes going back to the ball. "What's keeping it from spreading out and eating everything around it? I've heard children's stories about what would happen if a bit of the void—like the void we go through when we Apparate—were released in our world, and it always eats everything."

"Perhaps ordinarily that would happen," Draco said, taking over the discussion since Granger had looked helpless. She had probably never read the wizarding children's stories Herricks was talking about, while Draco had, along with most other people their age. "But I think that Nihil can control the nothingness. He doesn't want to reduce everything to dust and less than dust yet. He probably has people that he wants to suffer first, goals that he wants to accomplish. Or maybe he _can't _control it, and this is just the result of a first experiment. Or maybe—" Draco licked his lips. "Maybe this isn't what we think it is, but some other kind of weapon."

"There's only one way to be sure, of course," Herricks said in a pompous voice. "We have to read the memories of this chamber."

Draco smirked and gestured at the marks on the wall, which only looked like stone and metal until one leaned close and peered at them. "You want to do that? You're welcome to, if you can figure out what material this is and what incantation we should use."

Weasley leaned forwards around them, peering and frowning. "What _are _they? They look like they might be stone to me. Maybe metal—that part there shines like silver, doesn't it? Even if they're the footprints of something, we still ought to be able to read them."

Draco shook his head. "And would you be willing to do it with that right there?" He nodded towards the ball of nothingness. "Would you be willing to say that _anything _here is what we might think it is?"

Weasley fell silent, staring. Granger said, "Footprints can't be read like other objects, either. I read up on that. You have to use a complex incantation, a combination of the material they were made in and the name of the creature that made them."

"And because we don't have any idea what creature made these…" Draco let his voice trail off into silence.

"We could at least _try_," Herricks said, his face becoming stubborn.

"The way that you at least 'tried' closing a shield around me completely while I was casting?" Ventus asked.

Draco had no idea what the reference was to, but Herricks scowled at her and turned his head away, which at least solved that problem. Draco turned his attention back to the problem of discovering what had happened here. "We'd need a spell that we don't have any idea of," he said. "I think it's best if we take along samples instead, so that we can try reading them with books of incantations at our sides—"

"Even that might be dangerous," Harry said unexpectedly, raising his head. "We don't know whether pieces of this chamber contain seeds of nothingness that could spread if they were taken elsewhere." His voice was soft and hoarse, as if he'd been inhaling smoke, and he stepped away from Draco and knelt down so that his fingers were resting inside one of the footprints low on the right wall.

Draco frowned and reached after him, but Granger was in the way, crowding around and craning her neck. Draco retracted his arm and said impatiently, "Well, then, what would you suggest? This is an important clue. We can't leave it here. And what happens if the nothingness spreads outside of this cache? Why hasn't it yet?"

"I don't know the answer to those last two questions," Harry said. "But for the first one, I might." His hand was shaking as he took up his wand, Draco saw, but his voice was clear and certain, if soft. "_Memoria nihil._"

And then his back arched, and he screamed, a scream that Draco would hear again and again in his nightmares.

* * *

_There were no words for the darkness that surrounded him, eating him away. There were no words for the eyes he opened or the head he turned, or the way that he could see through the stone, always aware of it as a thin mask over the forces of death beyond. There were no words for the way that his mind clawed and scrabbled and sought to take possession of an alien landscape, of perceptions he didn't have the sense organs to comprehend, of patterns of thought that twisted away just when he was beginning to grasp them. It was like trying to live in a hurricane._

_But he clung on, because he had to, with the same will that he had used when he was walking to his death in the Forbidden Forest. He remained there and pressed forwards because it was something that had to be done._

_And he saw._

_Nemo had raised beasts that could destroy their enemies, beasts with death forced through their veins. But the world had changed since they existed, and they required a much larger amount of magic to live than was now in the atmosphere. Nihil could have invested the magic to keep them alive, but it was too expensive, and so he watched them die._

_They flailed and kicked, and their feet struck the wall, and created holes that went through the fragile mask of stone to the death beyond. Nihil had never seen anything like that before. The drowning part that was Harry felt his consciousness sharpen and focus, fixing on this odd, unlikely thing._

_The holes opened an inch, a pinprick, and then stopped. There would be no reaching through them unless they were forced._

_Nihil possessed the means of forcing. _

_Harry watched him do it, but he could not say how it happened. What mattered was that Nihil pulled death through those holes into the world, but it didn't simply manifest as the blue-black flopping things that Draco could bring back, the pieces of the void. Instead, what came with them, animated by the ancient magic of the resurrected beasts, a child of three parents—that magic and death and life—was nothingness._

_Nihil stared at it, and one emotion that was not so alien stood out from the whirlwind: longing. He wished to plunge within it, Harry knew, lose himself within it, and die._

_But he also knew that it was not as simple as that. As long as there was a world to come back to, a scrap of life to cling to, he would return. He would find a body to control, or something to be reborn within. So he had to destroy everything._

_He could only draw as much nothingness as would fill a small ball, the magic of the beasts was so limited. But he knew what to do now. Nemo would raise more of the beasts, and more, until Nihil had all he needed to condemn the world to nonexistence._

_The ball of black, the ball mortal eyes couldn't quite see, he left hidden within this chamber like a promise._

* * *

Harry came back to himself in so much pain that he was half-shrieking when he tried to breathe. But he clung grimly to what he had discovered, and managed to roll his head over to look at Draco. It was mental pain that he was feeling, not physical, and that helped with the decision to focus through and give his report. He had to give his report in case he died, because this knowledge could not die with him.

"Nihil found that he could reach through to nothingness because of beasts that Nemo animated," he gasped. "They don't last very long, and he can't get very much that way. But he can keep raising them and keep having them die. The thing we have to do is—is destroy Nemo, the way we destroyed Nusquam. He's the dedicated part of Nihil that has the most experience with raising the beasts. Nihil could still do it on his own, but not as fast or easily."

He shut his eyes, and whimpered. His brain rocked around his skull, liquefied. He understood what he had done now, and he was amazed and terrified that he hadn't died.

He couldn't read the footprints of the beasts themselves, because, as Hermione said, one would need a combined incantation for that, and Harry had no idea what the name of those creatures was. Instead, he had read the memory of the pure nothingness that had come through the footprints and into the world.

His last thought, before the pain seared him like sunrise and he fell unconscious, was that Draco's idea of reaching out to Nihil through the visions might have been a less risky one after all.


	16. Readiness to Change

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_Chapter Sixteen—Readiness to Change_

"He will recover."

Draco, even as concerned about Harry as he was, wasn't deaf to the nuance. He glanced up sharply. "You said that he'll recover, not that he'll be fine," he said. "Why?"

Portillo Lopez, who was cleaning the odd steel instrument she had placed against Harry's head to check some pulse or sign of health unknown to Draco, paused and gave him a level stare. Draco looked back, twining his fingers with Harry's. Harry was unconscious, and had been since their hasty evacuation from the London cache and return to the camp. Draco had gone to Portillo Lopez both because she was a Battle Healer and because he thought she wouldn't betray them. Seeing the condemnation in her eyes now, though, Draco wondered whether he wanted to hear what she would say.

She braced one hand on the bed where Harry lay and leaned forwards to look at him. "I think of 'fine' as a return to normal," she said quietly. "He will not return to normal. His connection to Nihil has increased. He will have more of those visions and dreams, I am certain. His moods may alter in reaction to Nihil's."

Draco stared at her in horrified silence. He had never thought this might happen. He had come to think—well, that Harry _couldn't _be damaged by the necromancy he practiced or whatever it was that really tied him to Nihil.

It seemed stupid, now, for him to have assumed that Harry would always be fine simply because there had been no reaction so far.

Draco cleared his throat weakly and took up Harry's other hand. It was limp and cold in his, and Draco would have given Malfoy Manor for it to warm. "But—what does that mean, in practical terms? What can I do to help him? Is it possible that he would betray us to Nihil even though he doesn't want to?"

Portillo Lopez remained cool and tense for some moments, and then relaxed enough to reply, "I do not think so. A stronger connection—a connection of the kind that you have with Nihil, yourself, through his catching you by his link with Nusquam—is not necessarily going to do more harm. It will _change_ him, as I said. You may have to be more patient with him." She pierced Draco with a look that showed she thought that would probably be impossible for him. "If Nihil could compel someone to do what he wants merely from touching his artifacts or toys, most of us would have been enslaved before this. As it was, Potter made contact with something Nihil had left behind, not with Nihil himself. Not that it was not a stupid thing to do," she ended, with a shake of her head.

Draco swallowed. It was little good saying that he hadn't asked Harry to do this or hadn't known he would. He had asked Harry to do things that might have been as dangerous, might have changed him as much, or more.

"Be careful," Portillo Lopez finished, and then turned and walked out of the tent before Draco could ask her for any more advice or make any promises. Perhaps she'd had promises like that made to her before, Draco thought as he stroked Harry's forehead. She would never believe them if they came from necromancers that she knew would find themselves drawn back to the Dark Arts whether or not they wanted to go.

"I'm sorry," Draco whispered to Harry. He was glad that they were alone now; he had dismissed the rest of the comitatus to their tents the instant they returned. He had to consult Portillo Lopez by himself so that he could make the decision as to how much to tell them. He didn't want them too discouraged.

But by himself…

Draco could feel the sting of tears around his eyes. He shut them, but it did no good. The tears were still there, and they _would _leak out. He took a deep breath and shivered, and then reached out and put a hand in the middle of Harry's chest. His skin was cool and waxy everywhere on his body, not just on his hands, but his heartbeat was strong, and Draco stood listening to it until he thought he had himself under control.

Then he whispered, "Never again. I'm not going to ask you to do anything like that again, and I don't want you to take the risks. That's why we have the comitatus now. Granger can research less risky alternatives, and Herricks and Ventus can handle threats that would cripple the rest of us. Weasley…"

Even in the generous plans he was making at that moment to spare Harry, Draco couldn't really find a use for Weasley. He hesitated, then shrugged and decided that he would simply have to do it later.

"We'll keep each other safe," Draco said. "You came into the darkness after me, twice. That was in the case of a risk _I _took, and if you felt one quarter the desperation to keep me safe that I feel for you now, I can't blame you. But otherwise—no. It's not happening again."

Draco knew he would have a hard struggle, against the instincts that seemed to urge Harry to become a martyr on the spur of the moment as well as with the other members of the comitatus, who would have different ideas about keeping Harry safe. But he didn't care how hard the work was. He would perform it. He had been willing to do no less to secure his freedom, defy his father, and win power.

And Harry was the most important thing in his life. Perhaps he could not have admitted that in front of anyone else, but here they were, alone, and here it was, as bright in his mind as a murder weapon.

* * *

Harry woke slowly. It felt as though someone was holding him down with heavy bonds, not wanting him to wake up. But he had struggled against bonds like that before, against weights like that before. He floated to the surface and hovered there, blinking.

He found himself on the bed in his and Draco's tent, which he had to admit was an improvement over the cold stone of the cavern he had expected to find. Draco was curled up behind him, chest pressed against Harry's back and his arms locked possessively around his waist. Harry closed his eyes and touched Draco's wrist for a second.

Then he started trying to get up, because, as nice as Draco's gestures might have been, he had to go to the loo.

The movement woke Draco, of course, though Harry hadn't intended it to. Draco pressed his lips against the back of Harry's neck and kept them there as he murmured a greeting. Harry turned around and kissed him, then renewed the struggle to get up.

"Not yet," Draco whispered. "Don't leave me yet."

Harry paused and gave him a wondering glance. "I'm not going to _leave _you," he said, puzzled as to why Draco had used that word. "I only have to empty my bladder, which I presume you wouldn't want me to do in front of you."

"No," Draco said, but the word was tinged with reluctance. He rolled away, arms lifting last of all, and Harry made his escape.

When he came back, Draco was sitting up in bed, clothed only from the waist down and watching Harry with a devouring hunger that made Harry flush self-consciously. He gestured to a little tray nearby with soup on it, kept warm by charms, along with cheese and a piece of toast. Harry nodded his thanks and started eating.

Draco remained still, staring at him instead of telling him what had happened, and at last Harry decided that he would have to speak. "Well?" he asked, around a mouthful of bread. "We must have got out of the cache all right, but other than that, I don't know anything. What happened after I fainted?"

Draco closed his eyes as if he would have to recall a complicated series of movements, but his voice was precise, the details bare. "Your fainting scared the shit out of all of us. We left the cache, after replacing the stone wall with a glamour. When we got back, you wouldn't wake up and were barely breathing. I contacted Portillo Lopez. She said that from now on, you'll have more nightmares and visions, and your moods might change to reflect Nihil's."

Harry stared at him, aware that his open mouth was full of half-chewed food and not really caring. Only when Draco gestured for him to shut his jaws did he remember, and then he closed them convulsively and swallowed the same way. "I don't understand," he whispered. "I didn't touch Nihil's mind directly. And the memories were the memories of the ball of nothingness, not his."

"But they were still memories _of_ Nihil, even if they didn't belong to him." Draco leaned forwards. "I heard you scream when you were looking at them. You suffered pain from them, whether or not you think you should have. I don't want you doing anything like that again."

Harry sat up, but he waited until he finished the soup before he responded. This was an argument he and Draco had had before, and he knew it wouldn't be easily resolved. But it was also an argument that Draco had used before without understanding how it went against Harry's instincts. Harry would simply have to remind him that he didn't usually plan to hurt himself; it was simply the result of instinct and opportunity, and he would do it again _because _he didn't plan, and he didn't know who might need his help in the future.

"Anything like that again?" he asked. "What would _that_ be? Helping you find out the truth about Nihil? Doing something that can fight and hurt Nihil? Something risky? You know that you can't hold me back from that, Draco, and I'm surprised you would try."

Draco closed his eyes and massaged his temples with one hand. Harry ordinarily would have apologized and moved to try and soothe the forming headache, but in this case, he could only do that by making a promise that went against his whole nature. So he remained silently and obstinately in place, and Draco opened his eyes with a groan and made another plea.

"I want to keep the rest of us safe too, Harry. It's not a prohibition that only affects you. We should use the strengths of the comitatus, the way we did in the first part of the raid on the cache. Herricks and Ventus came along to help keep us safe, and they might have been able to do it this time, too. We could have learned a lot from Pensieve memories of the footprints in the rock. There was no need for you to use your connection to Nihil and necromancy that way."

Harry shook his head. Draco _still _didn't see. "But I didn't deliberately set out to do that," he said. "We never would have found that chamber in the rock in the first place if not for my connection. That's not something anyone else in the comitatus could have done, finding it."

"And the investigation into the ball of nothingness?" Draco asked evenly. "Do you think that's something only you could have done? That there was no less risky way to find out what we needed to know?"

"It wouldn't have been information that was as complete," Harry said triumphantly. "Would we know about Nemo with any other method?"

"But, just as you don't deliberately set out to endanger your life, you didn't deliberately set out to discover that," Draco said swiftly. "You didn't know if the information would be worth when you performed that spell. It might have been even more valuable than what you did find. It might have been worthless. That's why I want you to stop taking risks, Harry. Because you gamble something that we do know is valuable—your life—for the sake of a gain that might not be."

"I haven't failed to gain something valuable yet," Harry retorted, more stung than he would admit by that tactic. It seemed unfair to him that Draco was going to turn his way of arguing around on him. "Whether it's information that we can use immediately or facts that we can put together later."

"But someday you will," Draco said quietly. "Someday you'll die. And we can't keep fighting Nihil this way, with these little jerks of wit and insight and brilliant intuition that cost you so much. Leave something for the rest of the comitatus to do, Harry. Let others help you. That's the hardest lesson you'll ever have to learn."

"What about _your _hardest lesson?" Harry snapped. He felt that Draco was right, and he didn't want to feel that way, because he also felt that he _had _to take risks. That was the only skill he had that the others didn't, the ability to take risks and survive them. "You were the one who reached out to the darkness the day we made the weapon, and that turned out to be a brilliant idea, too."

"My hardest lesson is learning how much I love you, and how much it would destroy me if anything happened to you."

Harry turned his head aside. Draco promptly moved so that they were still face-to-face. He didn't try to touch Harry or force him to look, but sat there, eyes so bright that Harry couldn't bear to look away.

Harry swallowed. He hadn't thought, _again_, about what might happen to the people he left behind if he died during one of those charges into the darkness. His vague idea was always that the lives saved or the information gained would be worth it, that his death didn't have to mean the end of the war or the fight or someone else's life.

And for Ron and Hermione, who had each other now, and Ventus and Herricks, who weren't precisely close to him, it could be survivable. But Draco?

"I would rather give up my inheritance than you," Draco whispered. "I would rather give up Malfoy Manor. I would rather give up my life. Does all of that tell you how important you are to me? Are you convinced?"

Harry nodded against his will. "But what about the risks that everyone else takes?" he demanded. "How can we fight a war that we have to fight defensively?"

"We only had to do that as long as we didn't know what was preoccupying Nihil," Draco said calmly. "Now we do."

"What?" Harry raised his eyebrows. "I discovered how he was getting the balls of nothingness out, yeah, but not why he hasn't attacked us in the past few months."

"It's perfectly obvious," Draco said, with a return of the superciliousness that Harry knew so well. "He's been busy creating these balls of nothingness. We should have remembered that his ultimate goal is to destroy the world so that he doesn't have to remember his pain, not to punish us or destroy the Aurors. He'll create them and create them until he has enough to make the world—collapse, or consume itself, or whatever the consequences are of bringing that much nothingness across."

Harry did feel stupid for not seeing it before, when it was phrased that way. "All right," he said. "But let's say that we do manage to destroy Nemo and keep him from bringing more balls of nothingness into the world. What then? I just don't think that we'll defeat him, and we might not know enough to oppose whatever tactic he comes up with next."

* * *

Draco sighed. Harry would do anything, it seemed, to keep risking his life, and he hadn't reacted to Draco's confession of love and desire the way Draco had hoped he would.

But then he reminded himself that Harry was struggling against deeply-ingrained instincts, instincts that he had to fight even harder because so many times they had _worked_ and won him whatever he was going after. And he had survived so far, so it was hard for him to imagine a time when he wouldn't.

"We'll work with the rest of the comitatus, of course," Draco said quietly. "And maybe with this group of Aurors that Ketchum was telling us he represents, always assuming that he was telling the truth. It's enough to hold Nihil at bay. We'll find out what else he's trying to do and keep him from doing it."

Harry gnawed his lip and looked stubborn.

"We have resources that we haven't called on yet," Draco said. "This group of Aurors. Our compatible magic—Weston and Lowell have hinted that it can do marvelous things, and we've barely explored them. Portillo Lopez's Order, which must know more than she does by herself. We can do this, Harry, without jumping into danger every time danger comes along."

"I don't do that on purpose," Harry insisted. "I don't plan it."

Since it seemed important to him that Draco acknowledge that, Draco did tilt his head in acknowledgment. "Yes, I know," he said. "But that doesn't matter when the result is so often the same, Harry. You get what you're going after, but you come back injured. If the war effort against Nihil matters so much to you, you ought to want to survive it, and not connect yourself to him or change yourself in ways that would render you unable to participate."

Harry lowered his eyes. Draco waited patiently through the silent struggle that seemed to take place, and finally Harry made a frustrated noise and looked back at him.

"What if this is the only way I can participate?" he whispered. "What if there's no other way I can contribute to the war effort? It's the result of everything I've done so far. I took up necromancy impulsively, and it was useful. I risked my life dashing to Hagrid's assistance, and we learned more about Nemo's beasts. I went after you into the darkness without realizing what I was doing, and I rescued you and we learned how to make the weapons. What else can I do?"

"Is this war your whole life?" Draco asked.

Harry stared at him, and then asked, as if he thought it was a trick question, "No?"

"It isn't," Draco said. "Your life is also mine, and your friends', and the comitatus, and becoming an Auror. You can do other things, Harry. I'm only asking that you not simply charge in and risk your life the way you did anymore. If you have a wonderful idea, _discuss _it with someone else first. Please."

"Because I came so close to dying this time?" Harry had a thick line between his brows that Draco knew he would have to address sooner or later.

"Because I've realized what would happen to me if I lost you," Draco said, and then waited.

Harry stared at his hands, at the tent flap, at the bed's headboard. Then he swallowed and reached out. Draco's hand was already waiting for his, and he held on tight, although it was hard enough to make Harry wince. He needed to feel the bone and the tendon and the flesh and know that Harry was _alive_.

"I'm sorry," Harry whispered. "I honestly had no idea that I was hurting you so much. I'll try to discuss my ideas with you first, but I might not always succeed. It's not something I'm used to."

"An effort will be enough for me," Draco said. "And that way, you can get used to it slowly. Over time, the effort will become more of a habit, and we can learn together. Do you want to do that?"

Harry turned Draco's hand over and kissed the palm.

Draco wasn't sure what it was about that gesture which made him react so strongly, but the next time he really drew breath, he was pressing Harry back into the chair and kissing him so fiercely that Harry made small gagging noises. Draco let him go, but only long enough to let Harry breathe and to move him from the chair to the bed.

He tried to be careful, because of what Portillo Lopez had said about possible damage to Harry from Nihil, but it was difficult. And Harry didn't seem to need carefulness. He kicked at Draco with strong, lithe legs, and his gagging noises changed to hisses of protest whenever Draco drew away, and his arms embraced Draco and wouldn't let him put more than a few inches between them.

He was all muscle and warmth and _existence_, and Draco had no qualms about being held so tightly when he thought that. He had nearly lost this, as well as all the other aspects of Harry. They might have gone down to darkness and then vanished.

He made Harry come with light kisses to his cock and then a few sucking ones that were as strong as the ones he'd used on his mouth. Harry shuddered and clung to him, head tilted back, face full of the drowning expression that Draco knew _he _had worn when Harry was still unconscious.

He had agreed. He would try to restrain his impulsiveness. He understood how important he was to Draco.

Draco spent himself inside Harry's body, rocking more to the stuttering rhythms of Harry's breath and the surprised cries that emerged from his mouth than to the urgency of his own orgasm. When he pulled out, Harry rolled over, embraced him, and sought his mouth. Draco was more than happy to kiss him, but Harry pulled away and moved his mouth up to Draco's ear.

Draco tensed in anticipation of some delicious biting, but Harry did something different. He began to whisper.

"I love you, too. I love you so much that I couldn't think about it before I leaped after you into the darkness, because there _was _no choice. When I see you in danger, all the rational preconceptions and ideas melt away. I need to save you, and that's all there is to it. I love you more than my own safety, my own life."

Draco closed his eyes. In some ways the message behind Harry's words was disturbing, but it did mean that he had a return in his desperately offered words, a return and more than a return. Harry cared more about Draco than anyone else, he must, or he would have hesitated at least a little.

Instead, he leaped, and as little as he liked the risks that came along with that, Draco could accept the tribute. He was learning to understand Harry better, he thought, and to see the good in the most risky things that he did.

"I love you more than the thought of winning the war," Harry whispered. "But I want to because I know that the war might destroy you, and I couldn't bear that. I want to make the world safe for you. I love you more than the thought of keeping myself fresh to do something other than win the war. I love you more than the thought of keeping my blood in my veins or becoming an Auror."

Draco shivered and lay closer, and let the delicious whispering continue, and he was recompensed over and over for the risks he himself had run, tying his heart to someone who had once been his enemy and who might die and leave him alone.


	17. Up Against the Barriers

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Seventeen—Up Against the Barriers_

"Sir?"

Ketchum looked up at Harry and smiled a little, as though he thought Harry was going to ask him a question he could laugh at. "Yes?" he asked, and gestured with his wand towards a small clump of grass. It vanished. Harry swallowed and then told himself it was ridiculous to be nervous. Ketchum wouldn't make him vanish that way for bringing up a subject that he had been the first one to mention the existence of.

Harry thought.

"Is it true that there's a group of Aurors who want to help us?" he asked. "Who are they?"

Ketchum exploded a small stone before he cocked his head in Harry's direction and studied him with interest. "Have you decided that you would rather work with us than against us, then?" he asked. "I know many others outside our small group who would be interested in _that _news."

Harry licked his lips and remembered the things Draco had told him as they lay sleepily curled around each other in their bed that morning before dawn and planned. "We're only interested in that if the people involved want to _work _with us, rather than order us around," he said. "We've almost died several times, but those dangers were part of the ignorance that you tried to keep us in as much as anything else."

Ketchum smiled again instead of getting offended. "That's a fair point. I think the problem is that we haven't had to deal with trainees like you before, the products of a war. During the first war with You-Know-Who, trainees were firmly segregated and not allowed to participate, and they didn't accept any new trainees as long as the war was going on. But here, we have some, like you, who are going from one war to another. We should listen to your experience more often." He let the smile drop. "Not that you don't take some chances you would better leave alone."

Harry was so heartened that Ketchum was making sense that he grinned giddily at him and decided to ignore the slightly dangerous tone in his voice. "I know, sir. Draco's spoken to me about that, and I'm going to try and use my life more wisely in the future. But for now, we've learned something that this group of Aurors should know about. Can we arrange a meeting where you're sure that no one would betray us?"

"I think so." Ketchum tossed up and then caught his wand, frowning into the distance. "I'll need several hours."

"It doesn't have to be today," Harry said, blinking. He was so used to delays from the Aurors that he had assumed this would be another case of it, with the meeting not happening for several days or perhaps a week.

"But it should," Ketchum said. "At least, if this information is as important as you claim it is."

Harry shrugged a little. "It's the reason that Nihil hasn't tried to attack us for the last few months," he said. "He's been distracted by something else. And it's certainly a fact that he would try to attack us and kill us over, to destroy the knowledge, if he knew that we had it."

"Your methods of information-collecting get more and more mysterious every time," Ketchum murmured, with a shake of his head. "Very well. The meeting will be at seven tonight. You're to come to my tent, as silently and as separately as you can."

Harry nodded, and headed off to spread the word to Ron, Hermione, Ventus, and Herricks. Draco had something else to attend to at the moment.

* * *

"And every word that you speak to me, Trainee Malfoy, is the truth?" Holder liked to put "trainee" in front of his name every time she spoke it, as if to remind Draco of the place that she wanted him to occupy.

"Yes, madam," Draco said, bowing and then straightening up and smiling at her. And what he'd told her was the truth. Ventus and Herricks were working together more and more smoothly. Harry was paying more attention to his studies. Granger was researching Nihil and attempting to learn more about him, something that one could say had been true from the first day she learned about him.

Holder paced back and forth in front of Robards. Robards hadn't moved or showed emotion since Draco had started making his report; Draco wasn't even sure he'd blinked. He sat there with his eyes fixed on Draco's face like a lizard's and now and then seemed to breathe. Holder was the one he was meant to pay attention to, Draco was sure, but he couldn't discount Robards, the brain that heard all this information and made the decisions as to what Holder would do.

"It does not seem like much," Holder said, and then turned around and leveled her wand at Draco.

Draco already had his wand up in front of him. There was no way that she was going to do to him what she'd done to Harry, and force him to reveal his secrets. If she cast the spell, he already had a countercurse in mind.

"Enough, Alice," Robards said, before anything could happen. Draco was aware of a vague regret, but he also felt relieved. He would prefer not to test his magic against Holder's right now. When he attacked her, he wanted his strength and quickness to come as a surprise. "We don't need to cast against him. Perhaps Trainee Malfoy himself would like to explain why his report is so inadequate." He leaned forwards now and stared at Draco, the pressure of the stare like stone against Draco's composure.

"Inadequate in what way?" Draco didn't need to feign his surprise. If Granger and Weasley were doing other, noticeable things, he didn't know about them, which meant they had hidden them fairly well—better than he would have thought Gryffindors could. "Have you heard something that contradicts what I told you, sir?"

"He means that there are more things happening in the brains of those we assigned you to than you have told us," Holder said. Draco was watching, though, and saw a single irritated blink from Robards, which he thought meant the Head Auror would have preferred it if she hadn't taken over the conversation at that moment. "What of the conflicts and the rumors of conflicts? What of anyone who has managed to discard their oaths? What of anyone who has spoken of wanting to leave the Aurors?"

"I haven't heard any of that," Draco said. "I can only tell you what I heard. And if you want someone able to spy on all sorts of people in the camp, you chose your spy poorly. Most of the trainees won't speak to me. They're either envious of my skill or fearful of my name." That was true, and Holder seemed to know it, given the golden sparks that flew from the end of her wand a moment later.

"Potter must be planning rebellion," Robards said quietly. "It is what he does. And yet, you did not report that."

Draco sighed and met Robards's eyes with finely crafted (if he did say so himself) impatience. "Once again, sir, I can only report what I heard. How is it that my partner and lover managed to keep something from me which your other spies heard about? He isn't a good liar. I venture to say that anything else you heard is more rumors, again planted by people who are jealous of him or me or both of us at once. He isn't plotting rebellion. He would have to have other people to plot with, and he would certainly have asked me."

"Then the fault lies in your honesty," Holder said, and stole towards him like a cobra.

"Or your paranoia," Draco retorted. He turned to Robards again. "Do you really think that everyone in the camp is plotting against you, sir? Why? We know that we have to stay among the Aurors if we're to survive. Nihil would kill us if we went out on our own." _Unless we were clever enough to stay away from Nihil himself, which it seems most of the trainees aren't._

Robards and Holder exchanged a long, level glance. Then Robards said, "Trainee Malfoy, your role in this campaign is limited. You _will not _accuse us of inadequacy. You are to redouble your efforts and report as often as you can, to Alice herself if you cannot reach me."

Draco bowed, but his ears were quick, and his cowed demeanor an act. He had heard the one word Robards had used, the slip that Draco thought he hadn't noticed but also hadn't meant to make, and he burned with excitement.

_Campaign_.

There was no reason to assume that Robards and Holder thought they were fighting _everyone _in the camp. Their animosity so far had seemed to concentrate on Harry and Draco. But they might be thinking of the war against Nihil as a campaign, and a grander one than sitting about in tents while the trainees trained would imply.

_They must have begun hunting Nihil in earnest, and perhaps planning with the War Wizards for the time when they'll finally destroy him. What else could it be?_

Then Draco frowned. He would have to restrain those conclusions that he wanted to leap to. Yes, it seemed likely that Robards and Holder and the rest of the Aurors who thought themselves above talking to mere trainees would plan to attack Nihil themselves, but Draco had no idea whether those plans were being made, or put into motion, or only discussed. He couldn't act on something that didn't have any basis but one slip.

But he might be able to use the knowledge. As he bowed to Robards and Holder and left the tent after a few more threats, he wondered whether the Aurors they were hopefully meeting soon would know anything about this.

* * *

"I'm still having the dreams."

Harry winced and leaned back in his chair to study Hermione's face. She was pale, and her hand shook when she put a cup of tea down on the table in the center of the tent she shared with Ron. When she leaned back in turn, Harry could see that she was swallowing continually. He didn't think that came merely from drinking the tea.

"I'm sorry," Harry said. "The Occlumency doesn't work, then?"

Hermione shook her head. "I think it holds _some _of them at bay—the less insistent ones. I'm not dreaming about being held in darkness anymore. But I still dream about him splitting up my body and using the bones to build something, and now there's a new one, where I'm in a series of marble halls while he's hunting me. It's a huge building, and I run through it certain that I have to find _someone _who would be able to help me, but there are just walls and corridors and arched doorways with no doors in them. And echoes," she added with what Harry thought was special bitterness. "Echoes that reply to my voice, but whenever I follow them, they're only my words."

Harry hugged her, because he didn't know what else to do. Hermione lowered her head and closed her eyes. Harry stood there like that for a little while with his arms around her and then murmured, "What do you think of Draco's proposal that you do research so that we don't have to take as many risks when we're fighting Nihil? Research balls of nothingness? And what about researching bone magic? That might at least give you a chance to feel like you're controlling the dreams. And if you're conscious enough that they're dreams, maybe you would be able to use that knowledge against him."

"I'll try it," Hermione said, and then sighed into his neck. "I think I would have done it before, but the books I looked in had nothing about the nightmares. Maybe I should treat the dreams as if they were real, for now. I have no idea what Nihil could be building, but then again, we have no idea about most of the things he does."

"And any little bit of information about him can help, for that reason." Harry pulled back and smiled at her. "Is there anything _I _can do?"

Hermione hesitated for a moment, her hand skimming across the table and seeming as if it were reaching for a parchment or book that wasn't there. "How did you put up with the visions that you got from Voldemort?" she asked at last, not looking at him. "You knew the visions were coming from him, and you knew what they were. You had to see people _die_ or get tortured. At least that's a bit of protection for me, because I don't think Nihil is targeting me specifically, and there's no death or torture."

"Except of you," Harry pointed out quietly. "I think that would be worse, because I didn't see _myself _dying in those dreams."

Hermione gave him a faint smile. "I think both you and I would rather see ourselves die than other people."

Harry paused, then had to nod, even though that meant he was shite at comforting her. That was the thing Draco didn't understand but Harry thought most Gryffindors did. If something happened to you, you could fight it or make decisions about it. If it happened to someone else, then you couldn't. You could only stand by helplessly, particularly if it happened far away or in a vision. You wanted to take action, but there was no one to tell you what the right action would be.

So you did _something_, just to relieve the tension. Harry had dashed off to help Sirius because it was better than doing nothing.

"I'll try to look for more information on bones and the machines or weapons you can build with them," Hermione said softly. "There are books the Aurors rescued from the Ministry that we don't have access to. But I know ways that I could get access." She chewed her lip for a moment, forehead wrinkling. "And the balls of nothingness. I don't know how I would research them, but…" And this time her hand really was searching for parchment or books, Harry thought. He pushed the nearest scrap of paper towards her while her other hand seized a quill and she bent her head down and started to write.

Harry watched her and wished he could take the dreams away. It really _was _better to have something happening to you rather than to another person. He didn't have a clue what he could do about Hermione's dreams, but he would willingly have suffered them.

In the end, he stole away with a pat on her shoulder. He'd thought she was too deep in the writing to notice, but she did reach up and squeeze his hand briefly. Harry decided that was the best he could do for right now.

* * *

"I take it that most of our members aren't a surprise to you."

Draco nodded and kept a bored expression on his face, though, in reality, two of the faces who were part of the group _had _surprised him. He had expected Ketchum, since he was the one who had spoken to Harry about this supposed group of Aurors in the first place, and Weston and Lowell, since they had worked closely with him and Harry and might be able to see their superiority to ordinary trainees. And Portillo Lopez and Gregory would not have been surprises if he had known they were in conversation with Ketchum rather than acting on their own.

But he would have said Hestia Jones was too nervous to defy Robards and Holder like this. Still, there she sat, among the others in the circle of light wooden chairs, biting her lip and looking as if she would rather be anywhere else most of the time. Then a look of defiance would come over her face and she would lean forwards with her hands braced on her knees as though daring anyone to chase her out.

Beside her there was a young Auror who Draco thought vaguely was a Seer of some kind, simply from his distant, abstracted gaze and the crystal that hung on a chain around his neck. He had a shock of dark hair, pale grey eyes that reminded Draco of his father's, and long, pale hands that played continually around each other like gamboling spiders. He caught Draco watching him and smiled.

Draco didn't smile back. He thought one of Nihil's living dead would give a smile like that.

"This is Auror Leonard Raverat," said Ketchum, and he had a note of pride in his voice that Draco understood only when he continued. "He's a traditionalist, but he has agreed to be our spy inside the Ministry. And he has moments of genuine prophecy."

Raverat made a dismissive motion with his hand. "The moments of prophecy are few and far between, Samwise. You know that I study Divination mostly to clear my mind and because I find the meditations congenial, not because I can use it."

Draco's opinion of him improved mildly. If Raverat wasn't going to behave like Trelawney, Draco thought they could work with him.

"I know, but every advantage we have on our side is a good one." Ketchum turned to face the comitatus, which sat on a group of chairs facing the Aurors, with one of those abrupt movements Draco thought Muggleborns all used. Granger did it, too. "All right. Where do we begin? What have you discovered?"

Draco had assumed that he would speak for the comitatus, but Harry leaned forwards and caught his eye. Draco understood. As the one who had discovered the ball of nothingness and the source of it, Harry thought he should be the one to speak.

Draco couldn't really dispute that, but he hoped Harry would keep in mind that the Aurors had yet to make any transaction of equal value. He nodded, and Harry beamed and started talking.

"We used incantations that would allow us to read the memory of objects, and went to places where we suspected Nihil might have been."

"How did you learn that?" Raverat asked the question in a gentle voice, but Draco could see the eager flame come alight in his eyes. He was the one in the group who would probably ask the most probing questions, and Draco didn't think that he was looking forward to working with him. He kept a warning expression on his face, ready in case Harry looked sideways for guidance.

But Harry seemed to know all by himself that he shouldn't tell Raverat everything. He simply smiled and went on. "We found that he had left behind a small black ball of something that hovered in the air and which it was hard to focus on. A ball of pure nothingness. In at least one place, he achieved part of what he wants, which is to reduce the world to nothingness."

"Why?" Jones was frowning and chewing fiercely on a piece of her hair. "Why should he want that? If he did that, then he wouldn't be able to conquer the world and subject us to slavery."

"Look at his name," Draco said softly. "He didn't call himself after the Latin word for power, or slavery, or victory. Instead, he chose nothing. And his distinguishing characteristic is that he can die and yet return, and the people he possesses become little more than buds or sacks full of him, losing themselves. He _can't _die. He can't escape. But he named himself after the thing that lies beyond all death and all escape. We think that he wants to die to escape the memories that made him what he is, and the only way he sees to do that is to get rid of every body and every piece of matter, so he can't reincarnate."

"That is a very interesting idea," Raverat said in a way that indicated his attention had been caught. "One wonders if he could have chosen another solution and what would happen if someone suggested one to him."

"I'm not in the business of offering solutions like that to him." Gregory's voice was fierce, her eyes brighter than Raverat's. "Why should I offer that to someone who tried to make the rest of you see me as a traitor, and tried to kill me, and _did _kill many of the people who were fighting with me?"

Raverat held up a hand. "Forgive me, Astraea." Draco stared; he hadn't thought anyone would dare to call Gregory by her first name. "I was interested in the philosophical side of the question, and I neglected to think about the practical one."

Draco was glad to see skeptical expressions appear on Lowell and Weston's faces. They didn't think that Raverat should have wandered away into philosophy. Well, neither did Draco, and he hoped that the man wouldn't do it regularly.

"This ball of nothingness," Ketchum said, dragging the conversation back to the subject by the scruff of its neck. "What was it like?"

Harry described it, and then described how he had learned about it. _Everyone _looked disapproving at that, even Gregory, who muttered something under her breath about how "Potter could have died, and then no one would ever know what he risked his life to find out." Draco was glad to discover that he had a few allies here, at least. Maybe their combined disapproval would be enough to keep Harry from doing anything else stupid.

Then he thought of the complications Harry had confessed were behind his impulse to risk his life, and sighed. _Maybe not._

"So we have to destroy Nemo," Gregory said when Harry had finished talking. She was sitting so bolt upright that Draco wondered why her shoulders didn't hurt. "The way we lured in and destroyed Nusquam. That should be fun."

None of the Aurors, Draco noticed, reacted with shock to the announcement that they had killed Nusquam. Gregory must have told them about that.

"A fine ambition," Lowell said. "And exactly how do you think that we should achieve that? After losing one of his servants, Nihil is going to be more cautious than he was, and it sounds as if he would keep Nemo by him, to raise these beasts, not send him out on killing expeditions the way Nusquam was sent."

"I also would not give much for our odds in facing him," Weston added. "He seems to be the weakest of the three, but that makes him all the more likely to rely on the tools around him, like these beasts, instead of allowing himself to be caught."

"I've thought of something."

That was Granger's voice, of course. Draco glanced at her and sighed. He hoped that she wouldn't make the comitatus look ridiculous in front of the Aurors; that was all he asked for.

Granger held up a book that was so worn and tattered along the edges Draco didn't know why it hadn't collapsed yet. It appeared to be bound in dragonskin, but still. Any force that could abrade dragonskin that way could abrade paper. "I didn't—I found a description of the ritual that I think Nemo is using to raise the beasts," she said. "It's mentioned and described in a footnote about human necromancy. It takes a lot of time and preparation. He probably can't go very fast, and he would be attracted to any rumor that there was a faster way."

"And you want us to spread such a rumor," Draco said, simply to be the one who incarnated the theory in words for the others.

Granger nodded so hard that her hair bounced. "Yes. Say that there's a book. Hint that we're on the verge of figuring it out for ourselves, perhaps. That would make him all the more determined to find it."

The Aurors burst into argument. Draco was silent, though, gazing thoughtfully at Granger, who flushed and held her chin up higher, as if daring him to disapprove of her.

At the moment, Draco didn't think he could. Perhaps not ever again.


	18. A Lure and a Vision

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_Chapter Eighteen—A Lure and a Vision_

"Do you think this will work out any better than the Fellowship did?"

Harry felt a little silly asking the question. It wasn't as though Draco knew the future. They were both in the same place, with the same knowledge or lack of knowledge about the other Aurors involved, except that Harry knew he gave more credit to Ketchum and Hestia for being good Aurors than Draco did. Why should Draco have the answers?

_Because I trust him, _Harry thought abruptly when Draco laid down his essay and looked at him. _I don't know if it's because I've followed him as a battle leader or something else, but I do trust him to be able to tell me the truth and give me the best estimate when other people can't._

"I don't know," Draco said quietly. "I do know that, in the last Fellowship, we put too much emphasis on the Aurors involved. We trusted them to lead, and we didn't take up the slack when they couldn't. I think, this time, that we are older and wiser, and if they won't cooperate with us, then we'll know to break free that much sooner."

Harry nodded, more comforted than he would care to explain aloud, even to Draco himself. "It just seems ridiculous that we don't have a group of older Aurors than we can trust," he muttered. "I thought the Aurors had been preparing for war with Voldemort for years. I don't know why this one caught them so off-guard."

"Best time to start a war, perhaps, is in the wake of the reeling from another war," Draco said, and leaned back in his chair, gaze fastened on the far wall. "Everyone thinks they can relax. Some people desperately need to, and that's why they'll downplay the threat as much as possible. And so far, Nihil's attacks have been isolated and more frightening than fatal, except when he destroyed the barracks. I can imagine that some of the Aurors, even now, see him as less than a threat than the Dark Lord was, because he's concentrating his attentions in different ways instead of declaring his intentions aloud."

"I would have thought that unbalancing the forces of life and death was serious enough for them," Harry said.

Draco eyed him sideways. "And if we hadn't been the ones to discover that, then do you think that we would believe it had happened?"

Harry blinked. "Oh," he said at last. "I thought they were just being stubborn." The thought of them simply not believing that Nihil had managed something so awful was—well, was more palatable, actually.

Draco shook his head. "I've been listening to them, partially so that I can seem like I'm fulfilling my obligations to Robards and Holder. From the mutters, they don't think that anyone can unbalance life and death that way, and they resent being asked to believe it. Some of the trainees have been fuming that the Aurors _still _can't tell them the truth because it's too awful, so they make up this stupid story and expect them to believe it."

Harry nodded. "All right. So how do we go about convincing them that this is real? Will the weapons do it?"

"The weapons will help, but I don't think they're sufficient alone, or the mutters would have stopped." Draco stroked his essay, his gaze distant. "We have the lure out for Nemo now, those rumors circulating, and if he takes it, that might suggest enough proof to the others. Of course, we don't know what Nihil will do then."

Harry shrugged. "So, basically, we wait and hope that something happens that might convince them."

Draco gave him a superior look. "No, of course not. We can try and convince them along the way, too."

"How?" Harry demanded.

"I don't know yet," Draco said, and snorted. "Do you really expect me to have an answer for everything?"

"I do, but it's not fair," Harry said. "I think I should work more with Portillo Lopez and see if she and I can sense the current state of the—the imbalance, or whatever. I mean, there were the unicorn ghosts and the shade of your father. Those were signs of life and death being different. What other signs are there? Why haven't we seen more of them?"

"Those might simply have been the ones we were 'lucky' enough to run into," Draco pointed out, with such a bitter smile twisting his mouth that Harry knew he considered neither of them to have been lucky. "But yes, studying with Portillo Lopez is a good idea."

He turned a warm, gentle smile on Harry that made Harry feel proud of himself, in a way that no one else managed to make him. He knew only one way to deal with the melting sensation in his knees, or return as good a gift to Draco. He leaned forwards and kissed him.

Draco caught his breath and then shut his eyes, reaching up as though he wanted to caress Harry's cheekbones. They were, of course, leaning across too much space between their chairs for that to happen comfortably, and they ended up tumbling to the floor of the tent. Harry laughed while Draco looked put out, but Harry quickly dragged him into a more comfortable snog, and then into bed, and that was the end of all scowls for the evening.

* * *

"Yes. That ought to work."

There was a strain in Granger's voice that Draco understood. As far as he could tell, she had invented an amazingly convincing glamour as well as a way to make it permanent and a way to make it seem guarded—but not in a way that Nihil's tricks couldn't get past—all in the same evening.

He walked around the platform set up near the edge of the training camp. That was all it was, in reality, a simple white platform, though it _appeared _to be hedged around with gleaming traps of metal and wards that shone like the sun whenever anyone passed near them, crackling angrily. Since Draco had been in this place when Granger began casting the illusion, he could see the platform that was the base of it all, but barely. The glamours were thick and convincing, layered and blazing. The book in the middle, though entirely false, looked like exactly the sort of leather-bound grimoire that most wizards would be tempted by. The binding shone with silky temptation. Draco could feel his fingers itching to pick it up even though he had watched Granger build it bit by bit.

"Done," Granger said, and stepped away from the wards, staggering. Draco caught her. In an instant she was on her feet again, brushing the dust off her cloak and glaring at him. Draco smirked back. He had wanted to make sure that she didn't go crashing to the ground, yes, but he had also known that his assistance would hardly be welcome, which made her straighten up so that he didn't have to watch her weakness. "What are we going to do?"

"We'll have two of the comitatus or our allies on guard with their weapons at all times," Draco said calmly. "They'll know to use them the moment Nemo appears. And we've warned them that he's capable of wearing many disguises and bodies, so the only thing that would keep them from using the weapons is if it's obviously the living dead or Nihil himself," he added, as Granger opened her mouth.

"I wasn't going to ask that, actually," Granger said, and it was her turn to smirk a bit. Draco knew that his face must have been disconcerted, and tried to smooth the expression away. "I was going to ask how you would manage to have two of us on guard at all times. We're sure to be missed."

"When you have Auror instructors on your side, it's amazing how much can be accomplished," Draco murmured. "Weston, Lowell, Ketchum, Gregory, and Jones have agreed to cover for us and use illusions of us being in class, if not performing all that well, so that we can have our turns on guard. Their time, of course, is their own, and if they say that they have something more important to do than be where they're expected to be, I don't think Robards and Holder can force them to do otherwise. And then there's Portillo Lopez and Raverat, who aren't teaching right now but working in other capacities. They'll provide an extra baffle for prying eyes."

Granger nodded a moment later, expression neutral. "I reckon that's the best that can be accomplished," she said, with one more dubious glance at her trap.

"Dissatisfied?" Draco asked coolly, though he had already noticed that she always was. Granger had brilliant ideas, good research skills, and a commitment to her friends that was truly breathtaking, but she still always acted as though she could have done better, could have anticipated some trick that Nihil would pull, or outwitted someone superior to her.

"I think it's ridiculous that we can't trust the Aurors, that we have to engage in conspiracies," Granger said, turning back to the camp. Draco walked with her, watching her cloak flap in the wind. "I know we have to, that we can't just go to Holder and Robards and demand that they trust us. But it bothers me. We shouldn't be so divided against ourselves."

"The adults refuse to trust the youngsters, the youngsters think they know better, and the oblivious mistake themselves for the intelligent," Draco murmured dryly. "So it has ever been."

"That sounds like a quote," Granger said, turning her head and eyeing him as though it was illegal for anyone to know something she didn't. "What is it from?"

"I couldn't have made it up?" Draco widened his eyes.

"Not something that sounds like that."

Draco put aside to be examined later the notion that Granger apparently _did _think him smart enough to come up with some kind of pretentious words, if not that kind. It might be intriguing to hear what she thought he would say. "It's a translation of a remark that Suetonius Malfoy made centuries ago," he admitted. "My father's translation, from Latin. I use it whenever I start thinking that the present is much worse than the past. _They _thought that their own times were much worse than their past. The Greeks and the Babylonians probably thought the same thing."

"They did," Granger said, and her face came alive. "I remember reading something about it. There was a lament written on cuneiform tablets—"

Draco listened tolerantly as she spiraled off into Muggle history. At least she sometimes said something interesting. He thought that he could work with her, appreciate her, now. And of course that wasn't a problem to be overcome with Ventus or Harry.

He still wasn't sure what to do about Weasley or Herricks, mind you. But then, not even the most brilliant general's mind could solve all the problems of military strategy at once.

* * *

"I don't understand," Harry said.

"You never do."

Harry rolled his eyes, but secretly he was pleased that he had managed, finally, to rattle Portillo Lopez's composure. She glared fiercely at him and then smoothed away the drawing she'd been making in the dirt in front of him with a flick of her wand. Harry wondered why she couldn't use parchment like anyone else, but the moment the snow had melted, Portillo Lopez had started making maps, diagrams, and any other images that explained what Harry needed to know in the soil instead.

"Think of our world, the world of life that we know, lying atop the world of death like a plate on top of another plate," Portillo Lopez said. She was sketching a pair of ovals, which Harry thought privately didn't look like any plate he had ever seen. "There are interconnections between them, but there are also thick places, places that no one can get through unless something unusual happens. Necromancers calling through the dimensions, for example, or someone opening a gate like the one your partner managed to open."

"That's not the way you explained it last time," Harry said, just to be difficult.

"This is less complicated." Again Portillo Lopez dug the tip of her wand down, and sliced it sideways. The line cut the ovals in two. "But now another kind of connection has been opened between them. That is what I think happened. Rather than a simple imbalance, which can refer to all sorts of changes, what has happened is an opening, a flow, between the worlds. Nihil has brought through too many living dead. He is too immortal. He has reached into death too many times to escape, to transform, to reach a source of infection for his grief magic or his other magic—and perhaps to resurrect these beasts that we spoke about the other day." It amused Harry that Portillo Lopez still checked over her shoulder before she said the words. She was more cautious of their privacy than either he or Draco were, most of the time. "We must close that gate. Or, if not so simple as that, if it is a new connection, we must _plug _it. Fill it in with something else."

"You think you can do that based on principles that your Order has researched," Harry said dubiously. He understood the concept she was talking about a bit better now, but not her confidence that she could succeed.

"Yes." Portillo Lopez gave him a small, challenging smile. "We would not have been able to construct weapons that work against the living dead if we did not understand the principles of life. We can move further than that now that we have those, like you, who understand Nihil better than we do. We can create a—a form of _insulation_ for the connection between life and death."

"And how long will that take?" Harry asked.

"I do not know."

Harry bit his lip and studied the drawing in the dirt again. "And is there any way that I can help?" He assumed there was, or else Portillo Lopez wouldn't have been explaining this to him; she would have already been consulting with her Order. But she hadn't yet said what that was.

"I believe we may draw some of the raw material we need from your connection with him," Portillo Lopez said. "Especially now that you have been _stupid _enough—" her voice flicked like a whip, and Harry jumped "—to read his memories."

"I read the memories of the ball of nothingness," Harry began again, because this seemed to be something that Portillo Lopez, the brilliant witch who regularly made him feel stupid, couldn't understand.

"I know that," Portillo Lopez said, though with a frown that seemed to indicate she preferred to forget it when convenient. "But they were still his memories. His activities. The presence of a mind that was inhuman and that nearly destroyed you when you encountered it before." She leaned across and rested her fingers against Harry's temple, staring into his eyes. "Some members of my Order are quite skilled with working with the minds of necromancers. I will bring one to meet you."

Harry grimaced. "I'm not sure I want more new people to know about this. And didn't you say that you couldn't tell anyone else in the Order about me, because they wouldn't understand you supporting and succoring a necromancer?"

Portillo Lopez shook her head. "You are not a necromancer. The tests I did on the nature of your magic, and the fact that you can call illusions to attack rather than the dead, are proof enough. Besides, you have already met this man, and I would not have brought him to meet you in the first place if I did not think he would be sympathetic."

"Who—" Harry began, and stopped. "Raverat."

Portillo Lopez nodded. "He is a Seer, the same way that I am a Battle Healer. That is not a pretense. But he is in my Order." She gave Harry a sharp look. "I trust that you will not spread the news around."

At least she hadn't forbidden him to tell anyone at all, Harry thought. Of course, by now she probably realized that it was useless telling him to keep such information from Draco. "I won't," he said.

"Very well," Portillo Lopez said. "He is busy with his own duties right now, but he will come and meet you in a few days." She turned her back and began to write in a book. "For now, go away. Attend to your classes, and to your duties maintaining the guard over the trap that we have set."

Harry nodded, and left. For some reason, Portillo Lopez seemed convinced that he and Draco would be the ones to catch Nemo. As long as she continued to take her turn at the guarding, though, Harry thought he could live with the conviction.

* * *

"He's a member of this Order, too?" Draco frowned, and then blew out his breath to watch the cloud that it made. They had enough wards around them, courtesy of Granger, Weston, and Lowell, that he wasn't worried about the cloud alerting anyone who might examine the trap that they were there. "I wonder how many people have allegiances that we don't know about."

"Lots of them," Harry said in a sleepy tone. Draco nudged him with a shoulder to keep him awake. Harry sat up and cleared his throat, which apparently was supposed to convince Draco that he had never yawned in his life and never intended to. "I mean, we have allegiances to the comitatus that most of the camp doesn't know about, and I don't think most of the Aurors we're working with realize how deep they run."

Draco shrugged with one shoulder and decided that he wouldn't try to explain the, to him, obvious difference between keeping a few secrets about who one's friends were and how well one could fight and secret oaths to a whole secret Order. "Have you been practicing with that focus trick that Weston and Lowell taught us?" he asked instead.

Harry sighed. "I'm not _good _at it," he said.

"That's why you practice," Draco said, rolling his eyes and wondering if he should be grateful that Harry couldn't see him. "To get better."

Harry sighed again. "You're better at it than I am," he said. "You show me how it's done, and then maybe I'll know how to do it next time."

Draco raised his wand, lit it enough so that Harry could make out his face and hands, and then closed his eyes and laid the wand on the ground. He had found that holding it distracted him. As Weston and Lowell kept saying, the purpose of this tactic was to sense the direction and condition of his partner's magic, not the condition of his wand. And it actually made matters worse that Harry had used Draco's wand for a time; he was all the more likely to respond to the hawthorn wood, which could be taken away, rather than the power that thrummed through Draco and couldn't.

The first version of the trick that Weston had mentioned seemed to work for Draco and not for Harry, which was probably one thing discouraging Harry, although Draco thought it just meant he had to find a different one. He pictured a crystal in his mind, a six-sided crystal with gleaming sides through which separate flecks of light darted. The flecks of light moved faster and faster as he thought about it, and then began to whirl in coordinated patterns. Draco reached out lightly and imagined that there was another crystal a short distance from him, while at the same trying _not _to imagine that it lay in Harry's direction.

This trick was supposed to let them find each other even behind muffling wards and other means that Nihil could raise to baffle their bond. Draco thought it useful and impressive, especially in its effects, and hoped that Harry would give up on the pretense that he couldn't make it work well enough to be worthwhile soon.

The crystal in his mind suddenly rang as though someone had sung a high note at it, and Draco felt a tremble traveling through the points of the crystal and leading away from him in the direction of that imaginary second one. He raised a hand and curved it, and imagined the crystal falling into his palm, followed by the second one.

He actually felt a brief weight pressing against his fingers, smooth and slick in the way that the crystal would have been, and shook with wonder. That he could call something from his mind into the physical world, without the aid of his wand or glamours, was a source of delight to him, and, he thought, would be for a long time.

He took a deep breath—this part of the magic was still sometimes disorienting for him—and then opened his eyes.

He could see through Harry's eyes. He looked down, moving his perception of Harry's eyes rather than the physical ones, and saw the folded hands on his knees, the loosely separated, lithe legs, and the holly wand clutched in one hand. He raised them and saw the lines of the wards around them, the gleam of Granger's illusion and the dim shapes of the hills beyond. He smiled, and felt his own lips stretch, on another face.

It was splendid, and difficult. He had to let it go soon and fall back into his own mind, opening his eyes with a little whoosh of breath.

"Master that, and they can never hide you from me," he told Harry. "I'll look through your eyes into every place they take you, and if we go a step beyond and master that next trick Weston mentioned, then we'll be able to speak in our minds from a distance, too, undetectably. Don't you think this is worth striving for?"

Harry's eyes were shadowed. He shrugged and looked away. "It just seems to me that I can't envision a crystal like that," he muttered. "Every time I try, I lose track of the way all the lights are supposed to be moving. I lose track of the individual flecks."

"You don't have to imagine every single gleam of light as being the same," Draco said patiently, the way he had said before. "I don't. Just keep enough of them in mind that you can be sure that the other person's image—mine, in this case—would be roughly the same."

"I don't know your mind that well," Harry muttered, and flicked a spot of dirt off his robes.

Draco suppressed the temptation to yell and reached out with his hands. "Then touch me, for a short time, and think about that second image they told us to use," he murmured. "A wheel of flowers and light, rather than crystal. You said it was easier."

"A wheel made of flowers and light?" Harry objected, although he didn't hesitate to take Draco's hands. His fingers were cold. "What does that look like?"

Draco gave him a stern look, and then began to breathe more deeply. "Think about roses," he murmured. "A wheel of roses, with roses for spokes and one huge white rose in the center for the axle, and light bouncing and shimmering off it…"

Harry closed his eyes. And if they didn't catch Nemo that night—the glamours Granger had woven would have informed them if he approached—then at least, by the time that they left their shelter later to give place to Portillo Lopez and Raverat, Harry could envision the wheel, and was even doing better with the crystal.

And Draco had thought he felt, now and again, a tremble in his mind as it strained in the direction of Harry.


	19. Drawing Fire

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_Chapter Nineteen—Drawing Fire_

"Why did you not tell us that Hermione Granger was having strange dreams?"

Of all the tricks that Holder tended to pull on him, Draco thought he hated this one the most. He was given no chance to defend himself, no chance to come up with a tactic that might deflect the question or turn it back on her. Instead, she simply launched the question and then prowled forwards, eyes fastened on his face, expecting him to fail.

Behind her sat Robards, and Draco wasn't confident about fooling _him_, even if he could fool her.

But being surprised or feeling irritation was no reason to give up. Draco locked his hands together and responded coolly. "Because she won't confide in me. I hear only rumors, and now and then I hear that Occlumency is working to help her, and then I hear that it isn't, and then I hear that she's dismissed them as only nightmares, and now I hear that she's decided they're important again and is monitoring them carefully." Draco offered a helpless shrug, hopeful that it didn't make him look _too _helpless. "What can I do? Unless she was my close friend and told me the truth about them in such a way that I could be sure it _was _the truth, I would be telling only rumors and unimportant scraps of detail."

Holder turned around and met Robards's eyes directly after his little speech. Draco didn't know why, and he didn't want to drive himself mad trying to figure it out. He waited instead, his breathing calm. He kept his eyes lowered as if ashamed, but that was more so neither of these clowns would see the furious contempt in them.

_Why not bring her in here and ask her yourself? Why not assume that they are important and treat her with caution and respect instead of setting someone to spy on her?_

But once again, Draco ran into the wall of the Aurors' disregard of the trainees. They seemed to have decided that, since so few trainees made it through the program to become Aurors, their opinions weren't worth listening to until they had "proved" themselves. And, Draco was rapidly coming to realize, trainees could "prove" themselves six days a week and still be accused of missing the seventh.

"From now on, you will make an effort to talk to her about her dreams," Holder said, in such a clipped tone that Draco might have thought she'd argued about it with Robards, except that she didn't piss without his permission.

"Yes, madam," Draco said, and then waited. He was going to lie, of course. He would talk to Granger, yes, but even if she gave him permission to spit every detail, he wouldn't betray her privacy that way. Granger was part of _his _comitatus, and Holder and Robards didn't have the right to the details of her mind or her memory.

Holder spent a few moments more stroking her sleeve and staring at him. If it was an intimidation tactic, it was one that didn't impress Draco. He stared back with calm, flat eyes, and in the end, Holder nodded and turned her back.

"Otherwise, your instructions are the same as they were before," she said curtly. "Dismissed." Robards had already picked up a piece of parchment and was sketching on it.

Draco took a deep breath, released it, and bowed. Neither of them paid attention, which was the reason he was able to curve his hand over to the side and flick his wand in a nonverbal Summoning Charm. One piece of paper from a large stack that Robards had kept his elbow on during most of the interview detached and soared over to Draco, dropping neatly into his pocket. Since both Holder and Robards kept their heads turned so determinedly away from him, to teach him his place, they didn't have the chance to stop him.

_Trust me to have stolen a worthless piece of paper, probably, _Draco thought as he stalked out of the tent. _But even if it's only an irritation to them instead of the loss of something crippling, I needed that._

* * *

"Have you ever worked with a Seer before, Trainee Potter?"

"Yes," Harry said. He didn't like this. Portillo Lopez had said that Raverat was a member of her Order, but he had brought Harry into a tent filled with mirrors and glass cauldrons and then asked that question. Harry was not going to let someone like this peer into his mind. "Her name was Sybil Trelawney."

Raverat laughed. He sounded normal, at least, Harry thought, not like he was trying to be funnier than he really was. "She's not a real Seer," he said, swinging one leg from where he sat in his chair. It reminded Harry of a Muggle camping chair, although the one Raverat had given him was the normal hard wooden kind that Aurors thought appropriate to trainees. "She can't control her gift of prophecy."

"And you can?" Harry retorted. He cast a glance at the entrance of the test, wondering if Portillo Lopez was still outside it. He would run if she wasn't, and try to find a more normal solution later.

"No, unfortunately," Raverat said. "I was about to tell you there are no real Seers, because none of us can control our gifts. The ones who do inevitably turn out to be charlatans." He made a wide, helpless gesture with one hand when Harry turned to eye him again. "I began studying Divination because it infuriated me that there was a power of the mind that could still escape our understanding, in this advanced day and age. But I've had no better luck than anyone else in bringing it absolutely under control. I've managed to remain awake a few times, for a few seconds, when a voice of prophecy starts to speak through me, but I can never remember more than that. It's frustrating."

Harry eyed him again. Maybe Raverat was saner than he'd thought him. "Well, if you're not a Seer, then what are you going to do?"

"I'd like to find a solution in your mind for our problems," Raverat said, so casually that it took Harry a moment to really _realize _what he'd said. "You're unique. You've practiced necromancy without succumbing to it, but you've also been connected to both of the biggest disruptions that the forces of life and death have had in many generations. You might be the gateway to our solution."

Harry swallowed and shifted back in his chair. "And how much has your study of Divination taught you about the mind?"

"Quite a bit." Raverat smiled at him. "I don't blame you for being nervous. I'm not going to go very far this time. But Portillo Lopez told me something she suspected, which I think is wrong. She thinks that your magic is such a hybrid of life and death that you could cast a spell and close this gateway that Nihil has opened, the gateway making the ghosts of dead unicorns and other shades appear, if you wanted to. I don't agree. Will you let me look into your thoughts and glimpse the true nature of your magic?"

"Don't you have to look at my magical core if you want to do that?" Harry demanded, and was proud to think that he had remembered some of the theory that Draco and Portillo Lopez between them were trying to teach him.

Raverat shook his head. "What I'm looking for is knowledge, knowledge that you may have hidden from yourself beneath the surface of your mind. Looking at magical cores is a delicate specialty and one usually only performed in cases of disease. I would hate to do it without a specialist about."

Harry clenched his fists on the arms of the chair and didn't care if Raverat saw it. He _sounded _honest. That didn't mean he was. And Harry thought he had earned the right to be cautious about who he trusted and what he granted them the right to do with that trust.

On the other hand, it was probably better to have someone like Raverat, who sounded sane, peering into his head than someone like Portillo Lopez, who he didn't trust not to go too far, or Ketchum, whom he trusted but didn't think had the skills. Or Portillo Lopez might show up tomorrow with a new member of her Order who was impatient and _would _insist on looking at the magical core.

Besides, Harry only had to think of the shade of Lucius Malfoy to want this problem solved. The longer the war lasted, the more it would cost Draco and other people.

"All right," he said.

Raverat gave him an approving smile. "Excellent! Well, then, lean forwards in your chair, if you please." He moved his chair closer and waited until Harry had obeyed, shuffling slowly along. No matter how slowly Harry went, though, Raverat didn't look displeased, but only understanding. Harry decided that there was some hope in that, too. Raverat might just be a good liar, but most of the Aurors who had to deal with trainees weren't even that.

Raverat surrounded Harry's head with his hands, but didn't actually touch it. His palms simply hovered in the air, and his voice was smooth and low. Harry strained to feel some brush of his fingers against his temples, and detected nothing. "Now, I need you to keep as still and quiet as you can. It's not wrong for you to breathe or clear your throat, but quietness and stillness helps me concentrate."

Harry closed his eyes in a slow blink of acknowledgment, since he didn't want to nod, and then kept them shut. Raverat probably wasn't going to do anything threatening—why would he?—but Harry felt better like that anyway. He realized he was panting shallowly and tried to force himself to stop.

"I promise," Raverat said, his voice sounding physically distant, "that I won't hurt you, no matter what happens. You shouldn't even detect me, if all goes well."

Harry blinked again, reassured by the first statement but not the second. If someone was going to dig through his mind, he would actually prefer to feel it. Then, as with Snape's Occlumency, he could tell where they were if not what they were looking at. Anything, even useless knowledge, was a weapon against helplessness.

Raverat made a few clucking noises under his breath, the way someone might when studying a report. Harry felt a brief flicker of air around one ear and thought a finger must have moved, but Raverat never said anything that would indicate it was so. Once, he did turn sideways in his chair, and Harry's eyes leaped open to see him leaning out to the left this time, his hands still rested around Harry's head with his fingers splayed. Harry closed his eyes again and tried to keep away the feeling that he looked a lot like a Muggle telly.

"I thought so," Raverat said.

Harry clenched his hands on the edge of the chair and fought not to jump.

"That's the signal that you can move," Raverat added, with another of those soft laughs. "I've examined your mind, and I think that there is a connection between you and Nihil, yes. But it's not a direct one. It has to do with you being on the same plane, bound to the same kind of disturbance between the forces of life and death. Portillo Lopez envisioned an actual link, as it were, stretched between them. Instead, it's more as if you were standing in the same room."

Harry opened his eyes cautiously and then reached up and touched the side of his skull. He didn't feel the lump he'd half-expected. Of course, he didn't think that Raverat had touched him or come close except with that brushing of one finger.

"How did you do that?" he asked.

"Long discipline," Raverat said, with a faint smile, and then snorted when Harry peered at him. "I was trying to keep it simple, since Portillo Lopez said that you had some troubles with magical theory."

"Go on," Harry said, and folded his arms. "I'll tell you when I find it confusing, and then you can stop."

Raverat studied him for some moments as though expecting him to change his mind, then tilted his head in acknowledgment and began. "The human mind contains a lot of electricity. Did you know that? Well, it does. Some of the electricity, at least to someone with a magical mindset and the ability to sense it, extends outside the skull. It forms a hovering aura around you, a sort of corona, like the kind that surrounds the sun. One can read spots in it, the currents, and the changing of the weather patterns, as it were." He paused, but Harry nodded. It sounded more comprehensible than most of the explanations that Portillo Lopez had tried to give him so far.

"It takes a few minutes to get familiar with the currents of someone else's mind, at least as long as they're calm," Raverat said. "Storms—that is, sudden, violent changes of emotion—blowing across the pattern can disrupt it. But what I do is cast a spell on each of my fingers that makes them sensitive to those currents. Then I spread them out, sense the currents, and start separating the electricity that corresponds to your moods and the normal activity of your brain from the electricity that corresponds to your magic. And in a case like this, where I'm familiar with someone else's magic—Nihil's—then I can compare my impressions of it to my impressions of yours. Like I said, they're on the same plane but with no direct connection. My fingers would have vibrated much more than the slight bit they did if there was a connection."

"Why can't Portillo Lopez talk like that?" Harry complained. "I don't understand how you learned to do it or develop it, but I could understand what you said."

Raverat laughed again. "I'm afraid that Portillo Lopez thinks the most precise words are the best ones, and if her audience can't keep up, then they should simply go away and get themselves an explanation. At any rate." He looked a bit regretful now. "The solution's not going to be as simple as she thought. She was thinking that we could just pull out some of your magic and stuff it into the gateway between the worlds like a bit of sacking. We can't."

"Well, er, good," Harry said dazedly. He could see why Portillo Lopez hadn't wanted to phrase it _that _way, at least. Draco would have objected.

"I'll bring the results to her, because it is at least good that you have some similarities to Nihil," said Raverat, and clapped him on the shoulder. "We can't use you to plug the hole, but perhaps we can experiment on you and get an idea of how those experiments would work on Nihil." He waited expectantly, then dissolved into a fit of snickering. "You should _see _your face," he said.

* * *

"Have you found anything else in your research about bones?"

Granger shook her head in Draco's direction, not seeming to be surprised by the silent way he had stepped into the tent. Draco felt disappointment, and then told himself a moment later that that was childish. He leaned on her table and studied the sketches and diagrams in front of her. Most of them seemed to be pictures of chairs and long bridges. Draco nodded. It wasn't his area of expertise, but he knew there were children's stories about Dark wizards building arches and thrones from the bones of their enemies.

"Nothing conclusive," Granger said at last, leaning back from the table and closing her eyes for a moment. There were lines of weariness on her brow, and Draco wondered why Weasley didn't smooth them away. That seemed like something he could do, at least. "I've learned that Grindelwald made a few machines from bones, that bone siege towers were repeated during the Muggle Persecution—but they were probably rumors started to frighten the Muggles in the first place—and that various wandmakers claim to have constructed wands of basilisk bones. But all of that was physical, not in dreams."

"Even so," Draco began.

"I _know_, Malfoy." Granger opened one eye to glare at him. "You don't need to tell me about the possible analogy between dreams and reality."

"You're living that analogy every night?" Draco asked quietly. He was no longer sure how often Granger had the dreams.

Granger twitched her head to the side. "Most nights. Sometimes the dreams are gentler and let me go more easily, but there doesn't seem to be a pattern."

"Hmmm." Draco picked up the nearest picture, of a heavy bridge that soared across a rushing river. "Have you been able to sense anything of Nihil's presence in those dreams? I mean, is he the one taking you apart? Or is it simply the darkness?"

"No one else has wanted to know the morbid details," Granger said, the hiss of a question in the back of her voice.

Draco shrugged and met her glare evenly. She could think it was simple curiosity that was driving him along if she wanted to, but Draco thought she was smarter than that and would see otherwise.

"Yes, fine," Granger said. "I could sense Nihil at first, or at least a force of evil that I would have called Nihil, but I can only see darkness now. If he started stripping me of my bones, then he's gone on elsewhere and left this machine to run itself." A bitter smile flickered across her lips, and Draco thought that Granger had never been as congenial a spirit as she became when she was having nightmares.

"And is it the same bones every time, in the same pattern?" Draco put down the picture of the bridge and picked up one of a throne crowned on the back with a dragon's skull. Draco thought it impractical, even for one of the notoriously unstable Dark Lords. Sitting in it would mean catching one's hair continually on the fangs. "Or does it vary?"

Granger gave him an approving glance, and Draco understood. No one else had talked to her about this, whether through intimidation or simple squeamishness. But Granger did better when she dealt with it analytically.

"The pattern seems to be the same each time," Granger said, and glanced about with a distracted air until she found a blank piece of parchment that she could draw on. This time she started sketching a human body, and Draco decided that she was a much less skilled artist when she was trying to draw on her own instead of copy a picture. Still, he could tell what she was talking about easily enough. "First, the leg bones go, from the ankles up. Then the hips. Then there's always a pause, and sometimes I wake up. Then the ribs, and the arm bones."

"Do you ever dream about losing your skull?" Draco asked.

"Twice now," Granger said, her eyes dry and her voice strong. She could at least look at dangers and not flinch from them, Draco thought. He reckoned that was one good thing about the Gryffindor temperament. "Once was last night."

Draco nodded and looked again at the image of the throne crowned with the dragon's skull. Perhaps Nihil was only playing on these particular fears because he could, rather than because he was taking the bones for the same purpose as some of the legends.

And then Draco's breath stuttered in his throat, and he wanted to curse himself for a fool. After all, they knew where some of Nihil's influences came from. They didn't know as much about him as would have been useful, but neither did they have to sit back and fuss in helplessness.

"The Death Eater caches," he murmured.

"What about them?" Granger finished the last touches on the skull of her drawing—which was being tugged away from the body she'd drawn as though one could just peel the face off like a rag, Draco noted in some queasiness—and looked up.

"We should check the records in the Death Eater caches and learn whether they conducted any experiments with bones," Draco said.

Granger's smile really could light up a room, the way Harry had described it as doing more than once. "Yes," she said. "Of course. But weren't a lot of the records and books destroyed when Nihil attacked the barracks?"

"I still have the Pensieve," Draco said, and stood up to lead the way.

He did wonder, as he walked, whether Professor Snape would have liked Granger looking into his memories. But he _was _sure that the professor would have understood a sacrifice for the greater good, and a sacrifice made to help an ally.

* * *

"How could you let Raverat examine you that way?"

Harry rolled his eyes and leaned forwards so that he could peer at the platform and glamours Hermione had set up. Even knowing that it was all illusion, he found it difficult to see the difference. Hermione had done a really good job, he thought. "Because I trusted him after speaking with him. You'll see, once you talk to him more often than a few barbed exchanges of words in front of the other Aurors."

"You shouldn't have let him get into your mind like that. You have no idea what he might have done."

Harry gritted his teeth and didn't answer. He had promised Draco that he would think before taking risks, yet. He hadn't thought about the fact that Draco might consider letting someone look into his mind a risk in and of itself.

"You were busy with Holder and Robards when he wanted to do it," he improvised, when he looked to the side and discovered that Draco was still staring at him critically.

"That has nothing to do with it," Draco said, his brow wrinkling as though he were trying, and failing, to work out why that would matter.

"Yes, it does," Harry said. "I considered the risk, and judged it worth taking. Among other things, he actually explained the magic in a way that I understood," he added, hoping that would be enough to distract Draco.

"Next time, tell me."

Harry glared at him. "You're my partner, my lover, and my friend," he said. "Not my father."

Draco's hand clamped down on his arm, fingers digging into his skin. "I'm the one who has to watch out for you, since you're apparently incapable of doing it for yourself!" he said in a harsh whisper.

"Whatever you need to say to convince yourself," Harry muttered, and wrenched his arm free with a pull that made Draco sway sideways. He was leaning closer in the next moment, crowding Harry back against the walls of the wards that sheltered them. Harry stiffened his legs and pushed against him, more than annoyed now.

And then he caught a flicker of movement from beyond the wards, above the illusory book that looked so tempting both Hermione and Draco had said that Nemo would be a fool to resist it.

"Shove it!" he whispered harshly to Draco, and pushed him on the shoulder to get his attention. "We've got a visitor."

Draco turned his head, but kept one eye on Harry while he did it, as if he assumed that this was a trick. Harry hissed at him, but Draco ignored it, watching intently. Harry turned his head, too, and saw the flicker again, just above the book.

Draco snarled in satisfaction. "I've got it," he said, and drew his wand. In a moment, he was free of the wards and bounding across the grass.

_Now who's taking risks, idiot? _Harry thought in fury, and dived after him.


	20. Dangling Over the Abyss

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Twenty—Dangling Over the Abyss_

Draco could practically hear Harry hissing behind him, but he knew what he was doing. That was Nemo out there, and they wouldn't get another chance to capture him if they messed up the first time. He tossed and caught his wand as he ran, to make sure that it was in his hand when he needed it, and concentrated on the flicker of movement in front of him.

One moment, he saw nothing but the darkness, broken here and there by faint shafts of starlight and the glow from the glamours that Granger had placed around the false book; then, as if his eyes had suddenly adjusted, he could make out the tall man in the black cloak who was studying the book with his head bowed.

Draco managed to get within three feet of him before the man seemed to realize that something was wrong. He spun around, one hand rising, and the night at his feet shifted and coalesced into heavy dogs. They didn't bark before they hurtled forwards at Draco, lean and rangy as wolves, but with the heavy jaws of mastiffs. Around the neck of each was a thick collar of what looked like metal protecting the throat.

Draco raised a Shield Charm around his legs, focusing more on Nemo than his beasts. Nemo might take the chance to flee while they were engaged with the dogs, and their trap would have been for nothing. If Draco was lucky, though, he would be too much intrigued by the book to run until he'd got through the wards.

His first sign that something was wrong came when jaws closed on his legs and shook him hard enough to spill him from his feet. His wand nearly flew free, but he clenched his hand down on it instinctively and rolled. He came back up, panting, and found that the wolf-dogs had leaped straight through his shield as if it wasn't there and were now on him, flinging themselves on his chest in deadly silence.

"_Confringo!_"

With a snapping noise and a nasty-sounding whimper, the creature on top of him flew away. Draco scrambled back up and nodded his thanks to Harry before he stepped forwards to confront Nemo again.

* * *

Harry cursed under his breath. First Draco didn't check to be sure that his Shield Charm had actually stopped the dogs—which Harry had kept a sharp eye on because he knew that Nemo's beasts had all sorts of surprising abilities—and now he was acting as though he didn't need to pay attention to the _rest _of them. There had been four dogs, and Harry's spell had only defeated one.

But they were partners, and Harry knew they should work together rather than spend time yelling at each other. He finished off the rest of the dogs with direct offensive spells, since it seemed as though defensive charms didn't work on them, blasting one apart from the inside, opening another's jaws so wide that the last one ran down its throat, and then bursting that one with the stuffed stomach open while it was still trying to figure out what had happened. Then he turned to go after Draco.

Nemo was fighting back not with a wand but with handfuls of drifting dark powder that flashed and sparked around him like immature fireworks. Each of them formed into small bat-winged creatures that circled around Draco's head, getting their wings in his eyes and their feet in his hair. Draco was dodging them with no more than exclamations of annoyance so far, but Harry, standing behind him, could see what he didn't think Draco could. The swirls of creatures were forming into a larger pattern, one that had wings of its own, and taloned feet, and hungry jaws.

Harry cried "_Confringo!_" again, and the creature lost a patch of its left wing. The rest of the hovering swarm turned towards him, looking suitably malevolent, and Harry repeated the spell. At least he could distract the thing's attention from Draco if he couldn't do anything else.

_Not that I would have to do this if Draco had waited for me and not jumped headlong into taking risks as if he _was _me, _he had to add, if only in the privacy of his own head.

The bat-like creatures split up as they came after him, flapping their wings in random patterns and swerving whenever he thought he had a clear shot at them. Harry swore at them so they would know he was displeased and then rolled himself into a ball as a small flock came in behind him. The flock swept over his head and collided with the larger one. To his disappointment, Harry didn't hear any shrieks or crashes that would indicate the breaking of tiny bones.

He promptly scrambled back to his feet and fell into the rhythms of battle, give and take and sting and cast, and hoped that Draco would have the sense and luck to take care of himself for a few more minutes.

* * *

Draco had never fought such a skilled opponent before. It seemed strange, because he was used to thinking of Nemo as the weakest of the three after Nusquam and Nihil, but then again, he had never exactly closed in battle with Nihil. And perhaps Nusquam's prowess had been in areas other than battle.

Whatever the cause, he found himself on the defensive, or rocked on his heels and forced to retreat, far too often. His one advantage was that Nemo still seemed to think that the book was real, which meant he wouldn't want to retreat too far from it. And whenever Draco had to stop and deal with one of the problematic animals that Nemo flung at him, Nemo would turn back and start trying to break through the glamours again. That gave Draco small pauses of breathing space.

_Smarter and stronger than I thought, but he's still not all that smart, _Draco thought as he swatted the bodies of some crawling bugs with painful stings out of his hair and once again shot a curse at Nemo's back. _Otherwise, he would hammer me until I dropped and not care how long it cost him to do it. Or he would have sensed by now that the book's a fake._

Draco smiled. It was always a comfort to know that one was smarter than one's enemy.

Nemo didn't seem to realize that he was coming back this time. He was standing above the book with one hand extended so that the fingers fit in between the illusory wards stretched above the cover, his lips moving in what was probably a chant. Draco struck from the side, hard enough that Nemo nearly lost his balance before he whirled around with a sort of wordless yell.

"Bastard," Draco said, on general principles, and began to incant a long and complex binding charm that should prevent escape in another form as well as ordinary escape. Nemo had got out of custody the last time they had him, and Draco wasn't minded to let it happen again.

Nemo laughed aloud, a hollow, booming sound that seemed to roll in from a much greater distance than he actually stood from Draco. "Fool!" he said. "_Look into my eyes._"

Draco jerked his head up because he had no choice; it felt as though someone had dug long fingers into his neck and forced him to do so. He found himself looking into Nemo's large, dark eyes, moist, like the eyes of a seal.

The void was waiting behind them.

Draco didn't struggle that much at first as he went in, partially because the hands seemed to be holding him still, and partially because he had done something like this with Nihil, who was stronger, and survived it. But quickly he discovered that this was a different part of the void than what he had seen before, or so it seemed. The flickering shadows that he was familiar with didn't dart past him. The chilling sensation sank deeper and faster into his bones than it ever had.

And then he began to lose himself, piece by piece and bone by bone, the way Granger had described.

It was no more pleasant to experience than it had been to listen to. Draco could feel links that ran between the parts of his body, links that he had never known he had, weakening and splitting. His bones splintered, and the splinters floated through his flesh and dug into his eyes. At the same time, his skull seemed to be drifting free, as if the breaking of the links in his lower body was a prophecy of what would happen to him later. The pain was worse than the cold, and Draco knew he was screaming.

He did not know how to escape.

He could feel his thoughts stuttering and slowing, and one of the last he had was that he wished he had listened to his own advice to Harry about not dashing into dangerous situations.

* * *

It took Harry longer to get rid of the bat-creatures than he had thought it would, since they continued to break into smaller and smaller groups just when he'd thought he'd eliminated one of them. After the destruction of that first group with the Breaking Curse, Harry thought, they'd learned, and now they never stayed still long enough or formed into clumps large enough to present a good target.

_Finally_, the last one turned into drifting ash that couldn't claw out his eyes or tug his hair out of his scalp no matter how much it might want to, and Harry turned, panting, to face the rest of the battle.

The first thing he saw was Draco, lit weirdly from within by a smoky light that made him look like a statue made of frosted glass. One hand was lifted as if to shield his face, and his eyes were wide with pain and horror.

Harry dashed forwards. No matter what promises he might have made to Draco in the past, there was no way that he could simply leave this alone.

Nemo faced him and made a careless gesture. The air between him and Harry filled with flying insects that bore a pattern of a skull on their backs. Harry ducked under them, rolled across the grass, and came up in front of a surprised Nemo. He had started to turn to the false book, and now he started to turn back, raising his hand and frowning as if it was very tiresome of Harry to require him to actually pay _attention _to the battle.

"You do not know what you are doing, boy," Nemo said, in a voice that clacked and rustled like a room full of the insects he'd conjured.

"Yes, I do," Harry said, and took another risk, because Draco wasn't here to stop him. "I know where the real book is hidden, for example, which is more than I can say for you."

Nemo paused and cocked his head. "This book is not the real one?" he asked doubtfully. "But it looks real."

_Nihil must not have put that much of his brain into this one, _Harry thought, and decided that he should pursue the advantage while he held it. Nemo might stop believing him and kill him at any moment, or Nihil might show up. "I know," he said. "It was meant to. But that's just an illusion. I can give you the _real _one, if you care enough."

Nemo whispered something, and then reeled back as though someone had slapped him. "Yes, it is fake," he said, and studied Harry. "What do you want?"

"Release my partner," Harry said, with a nod to Draco. He hoped that he looked less frantic than he felt, and that Nemo hadn't inherited Nihil's extreme grudge against them, which would probably make his tendril kill Draco instead of release him.

Nemo bit his lip for a moment. Then he said, "I would do much more for that book. Are you sure that you would simply like him released?"

"Unless you would both release him and betray Nihil, then I don't see any reason to ask for anything else," Harry said, and his voice was dry in spite of himself.

"Not my elder brother," Nemo said, which Harry decided made no sense, unless that was the way he referred to Nihil. "But tell me one thing first. Have you read the book? Do you know what it contains, and will the notes stay with you if I destroy this copy?"

"We read it, but we didn't understand it, so we couldn't take notes," Harry said. He knew that was the sort of lie that wouldn't have fooled Hermione for a moment, but it was becoming clearer and clearer that Nemo wasn't as smart as she was.

"I see," said Nemo. "Then I will release him, and you will bring me the book. I will accept no tricks, mind," he added, and sounded like nothing so much as a stern parent. Harry hoped that he didn't look as though he was going to laugh, the way he had suddenly felt in that moment.

"I promise," Harry said.

Nemo nodded, and then faced Draco and passed his hand up and down, as though waving a fly away. A swarm of the insects gathered behind his head, hovering in agitation. Nemo didn't seem to notice them, or perhaps he had such complete control over them that he didn't need to. There was a sigh, and then Draco stopped glowing and looked like himself again. He staggered backwards, though, and his eyes were shut, his head shaking as though he needed to shut out whatever it was he had seen.

Harry leaped forwards and caught him. Draco moaned and turned his head back and forth uneasily. "Where am I?" he whispered.

"Here, where the trap was, in front of Nemo and me," Harry whispered back, and cradled him gently down to the ground. Draco moaned again, and Harry's hands tightened on the sides of his head. He wondered what sorts of horrors Nemo had showed him. When Nemo was speaking—and sounding—like a stupid child, it was hard to think of what he had done, but Harry didn't think that he was willing to take the risk with Draco's health. Nemo was still powerful and dangerous, and he had to remember that.

"The book," Nemo said commandingly.

Harry nodded and stood up. They were lucky that Nemo and not Nihil was here tonight, but Nihil might be able to reach through this servant the way he had through Nusquam when she was in the tent. Best to act at once.

"I have to Summon it," he said warningly, "and then it will need to come through the wards that my friends have on it, so it'll be a few minutes getting here."

Nemo made a negligent gesture. "So be it."

Harry held up his wand and said loudly, "_Accio _real book!" He had no idea what, if anything, that would bring, but the point was that he had Nemo's trust for a few fragile seconds—as he saw when he turned around and realized that Nemo had relaxed, enough to smile and beam at him approvingly.

"You have better sense than most of your friends," Nemo said. "A pity that you have chosen to fight against us."

Harry hesitated, while his heart drummed. He was playing this by ear, and he had never been good at lying. But he thought what he was doing now was right. "Actually," he said, "there's a concession you could give me that would bring you to my side."

Nemo laughed in delight. "What?"

"Can I come closer and whisper it to you?" Harry looked around and then down at Draco lying at his feet. "Someone might hear it otherwise, and I don't want them to, just in case you're unwilling to give me the concession and I have to stay on their side."

Nemo cupped a hand invitingly round his ear. Harry stepped closer and spent a fleeting moment wondering if Nihil had ever regretted not giving this particular piece of himself more brains. Well, perhaps Harry's actions would be the ones that made him regret it.

"All right," Harry said, and licked his lips as if nervous. "_Incarcerous maximus!_"

The ropes snapped out and around Nemo's limbs. Nemo hissed and tossed back his head, dark hair suddenly flying, eyes so deep that Harry thought for a second he would be captured as Draco had been. But he danced back in time, and lowered his gaze, and then kept repeating the charm, which added not only ropes but anti-Apparition wards in the air around the prisoner, psychic locks to slow their thoughts, and a gag.

Nemo was thrashing on the ground in instants, so buried under ropes that it was difficult to make out his face or the color of the clothes he was wearing. Harry just kept repeating the spell, never varying or lifting his voice, and stopped only when he heard Draco sit up, wheezing, behind him.

"What happened?" Draco whispered.

Harry added a Stunner, hoping that Nemo would be less likely to escape if he was unconscious, and then knelt down next to Draco and hugged him hard. Draco put a hand on his shoulder as if for balance, his eyes cloudy, and glared at Nemo. At least he knew who was responsible for his predicament, Harry thought in satisfaction. He would have hated to suddenly end up with a wand under his throat.

"I captured Nemo, after he tortured you," Harry said. "I think he won't escape now. What about you? What happened?"

"I felt myself being ripped apart bone by bone, the way that Granger was," Draco said simply. He never took his gaze from Nemo, and his eyes were wide and hostile with a rage that Harry had only seen in them a few times before.

Harry swallowed. "I'm sorry," he said, which didn't seem adequate, but was true. "Do you think that you would benefit from talking to Raverat? He looked into my mind and seemed to do a good job."

Draco turned a scathing glance on him and opened his mouth, probably to resume the argument they'd been having before Nemo interrupted, but at that moment something bumped Harry's elbow hard enough to make him yelp. He turned and caught at it, wondering if one of Nemo's beasts had escaped his control, though he'd thought they all vanished when he cast the charms that imprisoned Nemo.

It was a book, bound in thick leather and tooled with black letters that made Harry feel ill looking at them. He turned it over, trying to find a name on it, and saw a small brass plaque. Harry squinted at it, feeling ridiculous and almost wanting to hand it over to Draco for a glance. He couldn't believe there was someone in the camp who put brass plaques on their books.

But he understood when he saw the name. _Gawain Robards._

"What's that?" Draco demanded, predictably enough.

"A book belonging to Robards," Harry said in a daze, passing it over. "I told Nemo that the real book was elsewhere and cast a Summoning Charm that said the real book should come to me. I didn't know that it would summon something like this."

Draco turned it over twice. Harry was just starting to notice that there didn't seem to be a way to open it—and no sign of pages, either, as if the book was all one spine—when Draco touched a section of the left side and made the book hiss and sigh and fall open to a set of thickly creased parchment pages.

"What is it about?" Harry asked, craning his neck.

"This is a book of plans in Holder's handwriting," Draco said in a voice so quiet that Harry wondered if he was suffering from some of the effects of staring into Nemo's eyes, at least until he started to pay attention to the words. "It—means that she must have written down the orders as Robards dictated them to her. Yes, that sounds like a division of labor that would make sense to them." He turned a few of the pages, and others were revealed behind them, the number not diminishing at all. Harry wasn't sure if that just meant the book was stuffed full of them or if it was some magical effect. "It's a book of war plans. What they plan to do, as far as coordinating with the War Wizards and other Aurors, to fight Nihil."

Harry stared and asked the first question he could think of. "But why would it come to my Summoning Charm?"

"Someone—Robards or Holder—must have thought of it as the 'real book,'" Draco said, and ran a possessive hand over the cover. "Perhaps they have other plans that they've been convincing someone they don't trust are real, but these are the ones they intend to put into action." He was touching the book like an adored child now, and with a dreamy smile on his face.

"Well, we can't keep it," Harry said, because he was really afraid that Draco might try. "They're sure to miss it."

"Oh, keeping it is out of the question, yes," Draco said, returning to himself. "But there's nothing saying that we can't _copy _it." He began to chant in Latin, moving his wand over the parchment pieces and turning them over slowly as if showing them to the wand. Harry wasn't familiar with the spell and glanced uneasily at Nemo, thinking they should probably move him into a more sheltered area as soon as possible. He wondered if Draco would want them to keep this capture secret from the other Aurors, as they had with Nusquam.

"Potter? Malfoy?"

Harry turned around. It was Gregory's voice, and only then did he remember that she and Ketchum were next on guard. He stood up and stepped around Hermione's still-glowing platform—Nemo hadn't had a chance to dismantle most of the illusions—to explain the situation. He wasn't sure what should happen yet with the book they had retrieved from Robards and Holder, whether Draco would want anyone else to see it. The Aurors had helped them so far, but betraying their leaders this directly could be a breaking point.

* * *

Draco sped up his copying charms when he heard the voices of his instructors. He didn't know if he should show the Aurors the "real book" or not, but he did know that he wanted the choice, rather than having it revealed to them by default.

He wondered if he should have told Harry not to mention it, and then snorted and dismissed the notion. He could trust Harry that far, he thought.

_And I can trust him to save my life and capture Nemo and do brilliant things without planning them on purpose. I just can't trust him to spare his own life._

Despite the ache in his brain, despite the pressure of tremendous and terrible dreams behind his eyelids, Draco was burning with excitement and the temptation to consider the evening a success.

In this book was the key to a different kind of power—among other things, the power he needed to punish Holder and Robards for the humiliations that they had inflicted on him and Harry.


	21. Building Bridges

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Twenty-One—Building Bridges_

Draco couldn't believe how many secrets the book contained.

It made him worry at first, in fact, thinking that perhaps the book was simply a distraction, that Robards and Holder were creating an elaborate blind in case anyone began to suspect that the secrets and plans they would tell others weren't the real ones. But he dismissed the thought almost as soon as he had it. For one thing, the book coming to the call for the "real" book told him that Robards, Holder, or both had to think of it that way, and it wasn't something they would have anticipated anyone else knowing so as it to use it for a trap.

For a second, when they had finished copying the book and went to put the original back, Draco could see the nest of wards that it had had to burst through. He shook his head as they placed the book carefully in the trunk, shut it, and watched the wards reengage. Holder and Robards seemed to have built in an exception for a Summoning Charm that meant the book would emerge on its own and not make the wards ring an alarm, and that the wards would return the moment the trunk shut. It was good luck, more, Harry said in a depressed and pompous voice, than they deserved.

Draco was learning to pinch him when he said things like that.

The most important of the things the book told them was about the sightings of Nihil. Robards and Holder had been gathering them and refusing to share them. The only thing they would tell the trainees, and even the other Aurors, from what Draco had overheard, was that Nihil had launched no direct attacks on anyone.

That was true, but the image of a figure in a golden glamour, his ranks of silent, staring living dead, and the resurrected beasts that Nemo raised had appeared all over England, and in front of Muggles as well.

Draco hadn't been able to control his exclamation of annoyance when he read that. This time, because it was late at night and Draco was reading the book after Harry had already gone to bed, Harry rolled over and pinched him.

But there was more.

_The spells the War Wizards use on the living dead are useless, _said one of Holder's tight scribbles. Draco could picture her bending over the parchment, her brow furrowed, her lips set in such a prim line that they hurt her face. _Only the weapons that Potter and Malfoy have brought back from beyond the grave. It is as I told Gawain. They will be the salvation of us all, and we cannot trust them._

There followed a list of spells the War Wizards had apparently tried to use, which Holder and Robards, or at least Holder, had watched and recorded. Draco was annoyed. He thought a description of _why _Holder mistrusted him and Harry so much would have been more useful.

There were descriptions of two battlefields where the War Wizards had tried to engage Nihil, cautiously enough that no Muggles had noticed the destruction that resulted. All that had happened, however, was the tearing of the earth and the boiling away of a small stream that ran down one of the nearby hills. Holder was right. Nothing they did, not all their maneuvering and coordination and long training, seemed to affect Nihil.

There were reports of the appearances going down in the last few months. Holder suggested darkly that Nihil was up to something else, but she and Robards had been unable to learn what. Their spies had felt flares of necromancy now and then, but they always seemed to burn out quickly, leaving the spies puzzled.

Draco smiled tightly. _We've solved that riddle. He's had Nemo raising those beasts for a short time, although they quickly fade, and then using the energy to create the balls of nothingness. It's no wonder that he cares more about that than about the small disturbances that he might be able to make with attacks. The balls of nothingness are the things that will actually help him achieve his goals._

And if Robards and Holder had trusted them, they might even have known that.

Draco laid the book aside for the moment—it was late and his eyes were beginning to strain in the faint glow of the _Lumos _Charm—and pushed into the bed beside Harry, who muttered sleepily and rolled over. Draco put a hand on Harry's shoulder and closed his eyes, but his mind was occupied with a moral dilemma, one of the few he could remember having. Did he owe enough loyalty to Robards and Holder, as members of the Aurors and people who had to survive in the same world, to tell them the truth about the balls of nothingness and those brief flashes of necromancy? Shouldn't he be above whatever petty grudge Holder had against them and give the information? Robards and Holder weren't evil, at least, or on Nihil's side, if the evidence of the book could be trusted. They might be able to use the knowledge more productively than Draco and Harry could at the moment.

But the dilemma had a simple answer.

_I can't tell the truth to someone who distrusts us so much, someone who wants to turn me into a spy. She'll only want to know how I learned it, and there's no way to tell that much without betraying the comitatus, the way we train together, and probably the Aurors who have agreed to help us._

_Besides, they would start watching us more closely, and that's all we need, spies that we don't know about._

Draco shook his head and closed his eyes. Sometimes he despaired of the Aurors surviving long enough for Nihil to destroy them.

* * *

"Do you trust me?"

Harry eyed Raverat, waited until the man began to look a bit concerned over his silence, and then said, "Bad things tend to happen whenever someone says that, so my response would be 'not really.'"

Raverat smiled, but the smile had a tense edge that Harry noticed, even if he couldn't explain exactly why it was there. "Very well, but I didn't damage your mind the first time I touched it. I was wondering if you could explain the circumstances to your partner and let me read his mind."

Harry nodded slowly. The older Aurors had reacted to the news of Nemo's capture with mingled exultation and concern about Draco. Draco had bristled up like a cat when Portillo Lopez tried to speak with him, though. Harry couldn't help but think that might be partially his fault. He had moaned so often about how hard Portillo Lopez was to understand and how little he trusted her that it was no wonder Draco wouldn't listen.

"I suggested that myself," he said. "Draco simply turns his head away and pretends that he didn't hear me."

"Is there anything you can say that would _make _him listen?" Raverat asked quietly. "We are more than afraid of what might have happened with his mind exposed to Nemo's. The torture he describes, and the way it matches the description of Granger's torture, suggests that this is a particular daydream or—or image-construct that Nihil makes use of. Understanding it could let us understand him."

"What's an image-construct?" Harry asked. He thought he might know from the name, but he was no longer going to take it for granted that he had found someone who could explain these things to him. He wanted the explanations, please.

Raverat gave, for some reason, an uncomfortable smile. "A hard concept to explain to someone who has not studied the mind," he murmured.

"I understood your last one." Harry folded his arms and gave Raverat a stern stare to let him know he wasn't playing around.

After a moment, Raverat inclined his head in a nod and cleared his throat. "Very well. An image-construct is the embodiment that someone gives to a thought which is very important to him. Usually it's a picture, often based on memories—the sort of thing that one would encounter when using Legilimency. But people think in different ways, and it can be a sound as well, a smell, or a sensation."

"How can you _embody _a thought?" Harry complained. "Thoughts don't have bodies."

"Do try to be a little less literal," Raverat muttered, though with enough of a smile to remove the sting from the words. "By embodying, I mean that the thought takes on a particular form—an association, if you will. Have you ever smelled a food and had it return you to a powerful moment or memory in your life?"

Harry nodded, frowning. He still thought of the Dursleys every time he smelled scrambled eggs and bacon, which had been one of Dudley's favorite breakfasts.

"Well, the smell is an image-construct of that particular memory," Raverat continued. "Think of it long enough and the smell itself becomes the important thing. Someone who looks into your mind would smell what you did, if it was prominent enough, and that would become a way of accessing the memory or understanding something about you. The image of removing bones from a body is an image-construct for Nihil, a visual one. He imposes it on others, Granger and Malfoy, and that means it is important. What it stands for, we don't know yet."

Harry chewed on that for a moment. He suspected he didn't understand all the complexities, but he understood enough to be worried.

"Why Hermione, though?" he asked. "She hasn't had the same kind of personal contact with Nihil's mind or the minds of his servants that Draco and I have. It seems an odd choice to make her dream about that."

"I wouldn't know the answer unless she let me look into her mind," Raverat said calmly. "But I would rather start with Trainee Malfoy. It seems as though he would have more clarity and resonance in the image, given his close contact with Nemo. Once I know what the image looks like, I would be able to find it in Trainee Granger's mind with less trouble."

Harry nodded. "And you need me to persuade him."

"Unless you think that he will simply allow me to walk up and probe into his mind," Raverat said dryly, "yes."

Harry smiled in spite of himself. "I'll try."

* * *

Draco sat stiffly upright in his chair in front of the older Aurors, conscious of the way that Raverat tried to catch his eye. Harry had spoken his words about letting the other man prod his mind with a bright, hopeful smile, as if he thought Draco wouldn't _notice _what he was talking about. Draco had refused permission curtly. He had had only a few nightmares like Granger's so far, despite the several days since they'd captured Nemo, so why should he let someone look into his mind? What purpose could it serve? Let Raverat peer at Granger, who would probably welcome the attention.

_You know she would welcome the attention because it might help her solve the problem._

Draco shifted on the seat and told himself that he should pay attention to what Ketchum was saying. Ketchum seemed to be the unofficial leader of the group of Aurors, in much the same way Draco was the leader of the comitatus, and his words worth listening to.

"…must keep this a secret for now," Ketchum said, looking resigned. He shook his head when Gregory opened her mouth. "I like it no more than you do, that we can't trust our superiors, but they let Nemo escape once before through sheer carelessness." Draco held back his snort; Ketchum had been part of the security team that kept Nemo confined in the Ministry, so it was rather rich for him to blame Holder and Robards alone. "We _have _to keep him this time, and learn as much from him as we can."

"I wasn't going to disagree with you," Gregory snapped. "I was agreeing, rather, and was about to suggest measures we can use to keep from discovery."

Ketchum, looking chagrined, motioned for Gregory to proceed. Gregory sat up, turning a gaze as bright as lightning on everyone present. Draco was pleased to see that Herricks squirmed under it and lifted his head higher.

"We cannot simply keep Nemo as long as his master will permit us to," she said without preamble. "The last time, it turned out to be a trap that might easily have killed two of our number." Draco stared, but Gregory didn't seem to realize that she'd done anything unusual in referring to him and Harry as real Aurors and proceeded blithely on. "I have found a spell that should cut contact between him and Nihil. If it works the way it's supposed to," she added, and then leaned back in her chair and was silent.

"If it cuts every connection," Granger said, "does that mean that Nemo will simply die or fade away? After all, he seems to depend on Nihil for his existence."

Draco nodded. He would have asked the same question, but he saw no problem in letting Granger be his voice when it saved him time.

"I don't know," said Gregory. "But considering how desperate Nihil will be to recover him if our suspicions about the beasts he raises are true, then I think it worth the risk. We _must _learn what we can."

Granger squirmed in her seat, and even Herricks looked ill. Draco suspected they were thinking of Gregory's potential use of torture, and had to fight not to roll his eyes.

"Yes," Harry said. "And when he inevitably dies or escapes or gets rescued, then we'll need to take advantage of _other _resources to learn about Nihil." He turned around and stared at Draco.

Draco stared back until he realized that Harry was referring to the way that he wouldn't let Raverat poke about in his head. He turned away with a sneer. Harry looked distressed, but how was that Draco's fault? He would be far more uncomfortable if Raverat tried to interfere with him—something Harry didn't seem to have considered.

"What do you mean?" Gregory demanded.

"Nothing important," Harry said, with that small, martyred sigh that Draco hated so much. But _he _wasn't about to expose weaknesses in the partnership by speaking about them in front of others. He focused on Gregory instead and asked the question that no one else seemed to be interested in asking.

"What kind of spell is this?" he asked. "How do you know that it will work on someone not human, like Nemo?"

Gregory smiled triumphantly. "It was originally developed for use on Dark Lords who linked psychically with their followers," she said. "Some of them could Apparate their followers from prison cells, read their thoughts, use their senses from a distance, or compel them to assume Animagus form, even against magic that prevented that, so they could escape. The spell cut those connections and decreased the powers of the Dark Lord as well as increased the chance of keeping any particular Death Eat—that is, follower." Draco was sure her slip of the tongue had been no slip at all, but he maintained an iron expression, and Gregory sighed and continued. "This particular version is powerful enough to block all known connections. We can at least try it."

"What if it doesn't work?" Herricks asked.

"Then we'll try something else," Gregory said, and Draco hid his chuckle at the bottom of his chest. At least he wasn't the only one who found Herricks intolerable.

"Are there any other questions?" Ketchum was glancing around the room importantly now, as if trying to maintain his leadership position. "If not, then we'll agree to try Gregory's spell, and something else if that doesn't work."

_Both of which we just said and which others are perfectly capable of comprehending, _Draco thought in annoyance, but he was too amazed that they had come to _some _concrete goals to voice his annoyance. He waited until Ketchum repeated a few more things that everyone knew and understood, and then stood up with the rest and made their way towards the front of the tent. The air that blew on them felt like the first breeze of summer, Draco thought.

Someone caught his sleeve. Draco turned, not bothering to keep his face free of irritation, and met Harry's imploring eyes.

"What?" he snapped.

"Please let Raverat look," Harry said in a low voice. "It's painless, I told you. He's described the process to me, and it doesn't sound any different from the one that he used to figure out if I was connected to Nihil."

Draco laughed harshly. "But I'm already connected to Nihil. And Portillo Lopez told me that we should watch you for changes in mood and other signs after your adventure with peering into Nihil's memories, and nothing like that has happened so far. I don't know that we _need _these conclusions from their Order."

Harry glanced over his shoulder, for all the world as if he were a member of the Order himself and wanted to make sure the others wouldn't hear. Draco watched him with some contempt. When did Harry become so tender-minded? He was willing to sneak around, lie to the Aurors, and act on their own even when it was dangerous. He was willing to risk his life for Draco's.

And now it seemed he was willing to do whatever Raverat and Portillo Lopez told him, stupid as those directions were. Draco didn't understand why, and he suspected that Harry couldn't explain it to him.

"Let him look and see what new damage the connection to Nemo may have done to you," Harry murmured instead.

Raverat passed them just then, with a grave look that made Draco draw himself up. He didn't see why this man had managed to get Harry to trust him. Harry had known Portillo Lopez far longer, had learned more from her, and still seemed to be inclined to view her with a wary eye, but all Raverat had to do was make Harry laugh and he gained his confidence in instants.

"I'm not interested," Draco said, turning his head away. "I'll let you know when I am."

Several of the Aurors glanced at them knowingly, and chuckled. Harry flushed. They probably believed he and Harry had been talking about sex, Draco thought as he gave them an arch glance, and why not? It was frustrating enough that Harry wanted to talk about something that should have been private in front of other people. Let him suffer some of the humiliation himself for once.

"Fine," Harry said. "But I am going to ask him to talk to Hermione." He brushed past Draco and hurried off to catch up with Granger.

Draco felt like scowling, but that would also expose too much to people he had no wish to show anything more than necessary to. He settled for raising one eyebrow and returning to their tent to read more of Holder's book. He reckoned he would learn more than Harry in the same amount of time.

* * *

"Malfoy won't agree?" Raverat was bringing a cup of tea to his lips when Harry ducked into his tent, followed by Hermione.

Harry simply shook his head and turned to smile reassuringly at Hermione. She was pale, although she had admitted to Harry that she would do anything at the moment to calm and control the dreams.

"It's painless," Harry murmured, and then glanced over his shoulder, suddenly realizing that he didn't know if perhaps Raverat _would _have to use a different procedure with her. "This one is, isn't it?"

"It is," said Raverat, and smiled at him, and smiled at Hermione. After a moment, he dropped the smile and peered at her closely. "Are you all right?"

"I want these nightmares to go away," Hermione said, loud and distinct, and sat down on the edge of the chair.

"If I learn what causes them, or what they mean to Nihil, then I may be able to make them do so," said Raverat, and moved his own chair nearer Hermione. Harry hesitated; the only other pieces of furniture in the room were the bed and the table. He decided that he could lean against the table. Sitting on the bed would have unfortunate implications, and considering Harry's success with Draco lately, he would probably walk through the tent flap in the next instant.

Hermione closed her eyes and relaxed her breathing much more successfully than Harry had, he thought. Raverat did look strange moving his fingers around her head like the branches of a palm tree and asking question after question, some of them loud and short and sharp, others in a dreamy voice. It had to be a different kind of thing than he'd done with Harry, of course, since Harry didn't have to talk. But Hermione wasn't crying out in pain, so Harry watched it go on.

Now and then he tried to catch a glimpse of the aura around a person's head that Raverat had talked about, but it didn't seem possible to do without special training.

Finally, Hermione caught her breath and sat there without breathing for so long that Harry started to get concerned. But Raverat leaned back with a smile and announced, "I think I know what it means."

Hermione released her breath and blinked. Harry waited, but when Raverat didn't go on, just sat there with a quietly shining face, he asked in irritation, "Well, what?"

"That Nihil is using the image of stripping bones from a body as an expression of extreme happiness," said Raverat. "These nightmares only started affecting you this season, didn't they, Trainee Granger? Not in the winter, when Nihil destroyed the barracks, or even shortly after?"

Hermione shook her head. She looked better than she had looked for weeks, Harry thought, and he felt a bit of guilt. If he had known that just being able to offer Hermione a concrete answer would do this, then he would have tried harder to find one.

_And how could you have, without Raverat's special training? Yes, you could make a guess, but there would be no way of proving it true. _

Harry took a deep breath of his own and released it unnoticed by the other two. Draco sometimes said he shouldn't be so hard on himself. Well, Harry was trying.

"No," Hermione said. "It only started in the spring. Do you think it could have something to do with the balls of nothingness and that he thinks he's close to finding a way to destroy the world, sir?" Her eyes shone, and from the way her hands reached out, then fell back in her lap and clenched her robes, Harry thought she was regretting not having brought anything along to write with.

Raverat nodded. "Almost certainly. And these images are not ones that he would wish to broadcast, I think. They are side-effects of his joy, which is so great that he can't contain it. Of course," he added, with a smile that Harry thought was close to smug, "he couldn't have known that we would find someone capable of reading the images and discerning what was going on, either."

"All right," Hermione said slowly, and now there was a pinched line between her eyebrows. "But why am I feeling this in the first place, sir? After all, I haven't been in contact with Nihil the way Harry is, and this started before we found the ball of nothingness, so it couldn't have happened just from being near it."

Raverat leaned forwards and placed a finger gently on Hermione's forehead, between her eyes. Harry saw her eyes cross trying to focus on it. "For a simple reason," Raverat said. "You are a Seer, or a potential one, and we are always more sensitive to such disturbances."

There was a long silence, while Harry stared and Hermione's face shone with some complicated mixture of joy, disbelief, and anger. Then Hermione started asking questions that flew so fast Harry only understood half of them, and Raverat started patiently answering them.

_Well, _Harry thought, still wrapped in his own version of the silence. _I reckon that Raverat might not need to study Draco after all._


	22. What Befalls

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Twenty-Two—What Befalls_

"You haven't asked me about the book that we retrieved from Robards and Holder," Draco told Harry that night.

Harry paused and lifted his eyes. He had been busy writing an essay a moment ago, but now he acted as though his entire being was focused on Draco. Draco frowned, not sure whether he liked that. The question had been meant to sting Harry's conscience. Instead, he looked half-accusing.

"No, I haven't," Harry finally said, when enough silence had built up in the room to convey a buzzing electric charge. "I wonder. What was in it?"

"Plans," Draco said. "They've done far more than they ever told us they would. More practice with the War Wizards. More use of spells against the living dead—so they must have captured more of them than they showed us. From what Holder wrote, it doesn't seem as if they trust _any _trainee."

Harry nodded, face still expressionless. "Well, that's good in a way," he said. Draco narrowed his eyes, and Harry shrugged a little. "At least it means that they probably don't have spies on us the way that they've demanded you spy on the comitatus. They wouldn't give them enough instruction because of distrusting them so much, and that means we would have spotted the spies by now."

Draco frowned. "Unless they did choose people who are inherently more skilled, or Aurors who are full-fledged or instructors," he murmured. He hadn't thought of the possibility of spies on them in return. He had to admit, it was disquieting.

"Unlikely, or they would have written their names down in the book somewhere, and they would probably have shared more information with them. But you said they don't seem to have shared it with anyone." Harry clasped his hands behind his neck and stretched them over his head. "So what do we do now? How is the questioning of Nemo going?"

"Fine," Draco said, still suspiciously. Harry was being awfully cooperative. "You didn't care about that until now. You said that we could leave it up to Gregory and Portillo Lopez."

"I still think that," Harry said. "But you've been attending the sessions anyway, I imagine. Have they learned anything else? Does it seem like Nihil is hunting for him? He would have to, if Nemo is the only way that he has of raising these beasts."

Draco slammed the book down and stood up, stalking across the floor to stand in front of Harry. Harry blinked back at him, but he didn't seem concerned or afraid in the way Draco would have expected. "Is this the part where I start worrying that contact with Nemo's mind _did _change you?" he asked.

Draco shook his head. "Not at all," he said. He had noticed no changes in himself except for some bad dreams, and he still refused to go to Raverat, the way that he knew Harry would have liked him to. "The biggest problem is that you don't seem interested in the book and Nemo, or you weren't until I mentioned them."

Harry looked at him steadily. "And you weren't interested in what Raverat found out when he examined Hermione, either, although he seems to have determined the source of her nightmares."

Draco stepped back, feeling as though someone had reached out and slapped his cheek when he leaned in for a kiss. _Or, be honest, Draco. You feel as though Harry did that. _"You didn't tell me."

"You didn't seem interested." Harry folded his arms and gave him a wry smile, which twisted on the edges just enough to make it bitter.

Draco turned away, shaking his head and running his hands through his hair for a moment before he remembered the way he would look if he messed it up and dropped his arms back to his sides. "We have to stop fighting like this," he said quietly. "Why would you assume that I had no interest at all in Raverat, simply because I refused to let him examine me?"

"Because you refused to let him examine you," Harry said calmly. He was standing up now, but he didn't move towards Draco the way Draco had secretly hoped he would. "I thought you'd decided his investigations were nonsense."

Draco swallowed air. He wanted to respond with a tirade, but it would look bad when, so far, Harry had managed to stay calm.

And he was aware of how Harry judged him, although he didn't think Harry was. Draco knew that Harry privately thought he was stupid for jumping on Nemo like that and needing to be rescued. Harry might never say it, but the _thought _was there, and Draco was determined to cut through the tangle between them for once, rather than allowing it to spring up.

"From now on," he said, "let's agree to be honest with each other even if we think the other isn't interested in what we have to say."

Harry shifted one hip on the table he leaned against. "I haven't lied," he said. "I simply assumed that you wouldn't want to hear about it. And when I was honest and told you that I thought you should go to Raverat, you reacted angrily."

Draco looked away. He didn't know how to explain his reactions in such a way that Harry could understand them.

_But if I'm going to be honest, then I'll have to try, even if I don't think he'll know what I mean. That's the hard part of bargains like this: they bind you along with the person that you want to tie to you._

"I'm afraid of letting someone into my mind," he said tightly. "After Nihil, after Nemo, I don't like the thought of it. That was the reason I refused. And, too, we don't have any reason to trust Raverat. You _think _that he's telling you the truth, that he can actually read your magic the way he claims he can. But what proof do we have of that? That's what I'm concerned about, Harry, the amount of truth, not the fact that he annoys me."

"There's no way that we can prove that Portillo Lopez knows as much as she claims to about necromancy, either," Harry said gently, walking across the room towards Draco. Draco had to admit that it soothed him to have Harry wrap his arms around him and hold him, although he would have disliked admitting it aloud. "Abstract disciplines like this…we can't look at them the way we can Gregory's fighting skills. I trust Portillo Lopez, up to a point, and I trust the people she recommends. One of them is Raverat. Today, he said that the image of bones being pulled from a body that Hermione sees is an image of Nihil's happiness. What she's feeling is overflow from his mind, rather than something that's targeted specifically at her."

Draco stood there in shock. He hadn't thought Harry would just _tell _him that. He had expected more questions, demands, and wary refusals of trust. He managed to swallow and ask, "And why would she be feeling that? She hasn't been touched by the members of that trio the way we have been."

"She's a potential Seer," said Harry. "And according to Raverat, they're always more sensitive. That's why she started feeling it first." Draco could feel Harry's lips moving against his head, and thought he might be grimacing. "I reckon that means that we'll start feeling it, too, although maybe not for weeks."

"Will we feel his rage when he comes to terms with losing Nemo?" Draco asked.

Harry sucked in a breath and then tried to chuckle. "That's why you should have been with us when we talked to Raverat," he said. "Because that's the kind of question that neither Hermione nor I thought to ask. Me because I didn't understand it enough, and her because she was too busy asking questions about being a Seer."

Draco shut his eyes and tilted his head back to rest on Harry's shoulder. Harry caressed his hair and said nothing. Draco could imagine the tenderness in his eyes without looking up. It seemed their fight had sealed itself behind them.

"Would you like to tell me what came out of the book and the questioning?" Harry asked quietly. "And how much of it, if any, you think we could share with other Aurors, the ones who aren't part of our loyal group?"

Draco reached back and clutched Harry's arm hard, the only demonstration he could offer right now of how much Harry meant to him. They had to be honest, yes, but there was no rule that they had to use _words._

Harry kissed the back of his neck, and waited until he could speak.

* * *

As far as Harry knew, or at least as far as he was learning from Draco, the world was mad.

Nihil hadn't tried to get Nemo back yet. Gregory, who was using torture on him and getting scattered answers that mostly had to do with the resurrection of long-extinct animals, couldn't figure out why.

"He depends on him," she said, with a disgusted shake of her head. She was pacing in Harry and Draco's tent when they had this conversation, shaking her hair back as if she were about to go into battle. "I believe that. But now he leaves him in his enemies' custody and lets small bits of information be wrenched out of him. Why?"

Harry ended up shaking his head in response, which was fine, since he thought Gregory simply wanted an audience that she could rant at, rather than someone who would actually try to offer her advice. She didn't tend to take advice well.

The "real book" made clear the extent to which Holder and Robards distrusted everyone but themselves. There was no evidence that they were fighting a war, Harry sometimes thought—until you read that book. Then you saw the minor attacks Nihil was making, and the way that the War Wizards were trying to fight and contain him and failing. The problem was that they wouldn't admit as much, and though they kept records of what weapons and spells didn't work against Nihil, they shared that knowledge with no one. How were the Aurors and trainees supposed to _fight _Nihil that way, if he dropped suddenly into the middle of the trainee camps?

Raverat and Hermione were working on training her to be a Seer. Harry couldn't follow most of the obscure magical discussions they had, though he attended some of the time, but he was glad he was there to hear the immortal line from Hermione, as she leaned back in her chair and threw down a scroll she'd been taking notes on:

"I should have listened more to Professor Trelawney."

It was a small note of humor in the weeks that became bleaker and grimmer. Ron was glad that he understood what was happening with Hermione, but not pleased that she was spending so much time with Raverat. He complained to Harry and seemed to expect him to agree that anyone normal would want to sleep with Hermione. Harry had to nod and mutter and spend his days soothing his best friend so that the comitatus wouldn't dissolve into bickering factions. And Ron didn't like Draco spending the amount of time that he did with Hermione, either, so there was more soothing to be done.

Not that the comitatus was doing much at the moment, Harry thought. They hadn't met on their own in weeks. They were always in the presence of the older Aurors when they had something to report, and that wasn't a bad thing, but it meant that Herricks sat there with his lip sticking out, and Ron watched Draco and Raverat with brewing jealousy but no words, and there was no way to talk to just the six of them at once.

The world seemed to be splintering around him, with unanswered questions hanging in the air above his head and people whose relationships he was responsible for protecting talking to him about different things, from different sides, and the knowledge that Robards and Holder distrusted them making him doubt his own actions. Was he acting convincingly enough? Should he be fighting with Draco more? When were they going to find out that Harry and Draco had a copy of their book, and when would they find out about Nemo? Harry thought they would.

The gathering thunderstorm gathered much longer than he had thought it would. It was the last week of May before it burst.

* * *

Draco rolled his eyes as Raverat and Granger spoke softly about what was necessary to become a Seer. The list of characteristics included a certain "clarity and openness of mind" that Draco thought was code for "a willingness to believe anything and everything." He found it hard to believe that Granger had been converted from her obsessive skepticism simply because Raverat had told her that she might be a Seer.

Harry shifted beside him, and Draco smiled at him. Though he knew it was a strained smile, at least he was trying. At least he was here, and after Raverat gave Granger some kind of exercise, then he was going to talk to Draco. Harry smiled back and nodded, as if to say that he appreciated Draco's sacrifice.

Raverat handed Granger a piece of parchment and said something that made her beam and start scribbling. Draco shook his head. Maybe that was the secret: give Granger homework and she would try anything.

"Hello, Trainee Malfoy. You've been avoiding me."

Draco nodded shortly and stepped forwards. Then he paused. Granger had the chair opposite Raverat, and Draco had been standing until this point. But from what Harry had said, he didn't think he wanted to be standing upright when Raverat started to examine him.

"You've finally agreed," Raverat said. He didn't seem to recognize the problem, and just went on examining Draco with critical eyes while he leaned back in his seat. "Why? Why would you resist for so long and then accept?"

"For Harry's sake," Draco said. "And because I consider Granger to be partially under my protection, and I want to see what you're making her do."

Granger jerked her head up, staring at him. Draco ignored that. It was true, really. She was part of the comitatus, and that meant he was still responsible for her at least some of the time.

"I see," said Raverat, studying him with more interest than he had shown before. Draco told himself to ignore the chill wave that swept over him. So far, Raverat hadn't shown that he was evil in any way. Draco would have to accept that both Granger and Harry had emerged unharmed from his hands, and Harry, at least, had to be one of Nihil's targets. "Sit down here, then." He rose to his feet and offered his own chair.

Draco took it, though he checked it carefully first for springs and loaded traps. He thought Raverat must be annoyed that Draco had waited so long to see him, and if the man had been in Slytherin—as seemed likely—a means of retaliation would not be out of the question. But he found nothing, and he finally sat down and looked up at Raverat.

"Now." Raverat leaned forwards and held out his fingers in absurd patterns. Draco tried to keep his expression bored although he could feel his pulse leaping about in his throat. "Do sit still and be quiet. I need to learn the patterns of your mind first, before I can learn the changes that might be present among them, and sudden disruptions from your emotions or your movements will mean I have to start over."

Draco nodded. So far as he could find that reassuring, he did. It sounded like what Harry had told him Raverat said. He leaned back in his chair and calmed his breathing, forcing himself to sink into the cold contemplation that his father had taught him in order to avoid boredom when he was waiting in the Ministry.

Raverat murmured something and began to move his fingers like dowsing rods. Draco let his eyes fall shut, because he couldn't see what leaving them open would achieve. He would only have the absurd sight of Raverat, Harry's concerned face or Granger's worried one, and the walls of the tent to fill his sight.

Raverat came closer to him, though Draco sensed a touch from him only once, when it felt as though the edge of a fingernail scraped along his cheek. Draco bit his lip and said nothing, keeping his mind still. He wanted to find out whether Nemo had marked him as much as Harry did, though, he thought, for rather different reasons. For one thing, Harry would stop hinting that he see Raverat if he did.

"What—" Raverat's voice, sharp and panicked.

The familiar darkness and bone-eating cold crept over Draco. He opened his eyes and bolted to his feet. There seemed no need to sit still if Raverat was speaking like that.

The tent was filled with the spinning void, though here and there Draco could see shifting sparks of what looked like distant yellow campfires. He had never seen that before, and it made him slow to react.

A great, skeletal hand reached down from above and grasped him, yanking him up. Another one grabbed Harry at the same time.

Draco could feel the cold better than he could feel the bones gripping him. He could see the sides of the tent speeding past him as though they extended far higher than he knew they did. He writhed and kicked, but the hand never loosened its grip, and in fact he heard someone laughing softly into his ear as though they had anticipated that and knew he would never get loose.

Draco drew his wand from its place in his sleeve.

The voice gasped as though drawing in breath, and Draco lashed out with his wand and his legs at the same time. But the hand, holding him from above, wasn't vulnerable to that, and his spell flew wide. Draco turned his head, reaching out for Harry instinctively, trying to use the compatible magic that flowed between them.

He couldn't see Harry. The small yellow sparks had died, and now he was in that familiar darkness that had almost eaten him three times before, and he was alone.

* * *

Harry didn't know what Draco was seeing, but he didn't think it was one tenth as strange as what he was seeing. He could see the bony fingers that reached down for them and gripped their shoulders and their hair. It was no _trouble _to see those. They loomed, as if shoving other things into the background on purpose.

The problem was, Harry could also see their glowing transparency, and he knew that meant they weren't really there.

Behind them was nothingness, like the ball of nothingness, dripping tar that refused his sight. But Harry could make out the yellow sparks at the same time, circulating through the tar, popping out again in a way that seemed to suggest both of them could exist in the same place without touching one another.

It was dizzying. And worse than dizzying was the fact that, when Harry glanced to the side, Draco had vanished and the space where he had been was filled only with cold.

Harry closed his eyes and remembered the wheel that Draco had told him to envision, spokes and axle shining with roses. He wasn't good at the crystal or the other visualizations that Lowell and Weston had told them to use, and he suspected this wasn't a skill that he was ever going to get good at. But he had become as close to expert as he ever could with the wheel.

He reached out towards Draco, extending his consciousness or magic or whatever it was that allowed them to sense each other.

The barrier between them shivered, and broke apart. Harry saw Draco still rising through darkness, still held in the grip of a bony hand, and all around them drifted and rang Nihil's laughter.

Harry concentrated. He didn't know what would happen if he did, but he hoped that he could get through to Draco somehow, speak in his mind the way that Draco had said they should be able to do when they'd mastered this technique.

But Harry only ran into darkness when he tried. The chill grew worse, and he felt as though it were dancing in the middle of his bones, hollowing them, eating the marrow. He cursed and tried again, and the laughter in his ears—Draco's ears—grew worse. Whatever the vision of the wheel had permitted him to do, it wouldn't let him rescue Draco by speaking into his mind and coming up with a plan.

Harry sharpened his concentration and ignored the way that the chill seemed to be deepening around his own limbs, too. There _had _to be a way past this. They couldn't just give up and let Nihil take them.

He looked up, and realized that the bony hand that gripped Draco wasn't transparent. He channeled his magic towards it without thinking twice, the compatible magic that ran through their bodies and which he seized control of without thought, since Draco wasn't using it right now.

The creature that held them shrieked as chips of bone splintered from its hand. Harry grinned fiercely and hammered away at it with power again. If the one holding him was illusion, this was the real one, and it could be killed like the beasts that they had fought in the past.

Draco seemed to understand what he was doing at the same time, because Harry felt the leap of understanding in his brain, and then the magic that was flowing through Harry redoubled. Together, they hit out with it like a whip, and the bony fingers shattered enough to drop Draco into the void.

Harry snapped himself back into his own body, and found he was falling, too. The creature had somehow lifted both of them with only one hand. It didn't matter that he understand it right now; it only mattered that he and Draco get back to the real world.

He reached out to Draco, and this time the compatible magic flowed back to him at once. Harry envisioned the tent with Raverat and Hermione in it as hard as he could and sent the vision to Draco, who answered back with a wordless blast of emotions: relief and determination. They would find it if they could.

Harry wound the compatible magic into a loop of rope and tossed it to Draco. The one thing they had to avoid was getting separated. Harry didn't know that he could venture into the void again to rescue Draco, since what they had entered was so different from the darkness they'd experienced the other times.

Down they fell, and then the rope caught, drawing them together, pinwheeling them around until Harry gasped in discomfort. But he had a tight hold on Draco now, and could feel his body pressed against Harry's, shaking with the magic, although he couldn't see him. He shut his eyes and pictured the tent again.

The laughter was in his ears again, snarling so hard that Harry flinched. He thought he could feel spittle striking him, but no breath. Of course not, he thought, Nihil was dead and there was no reason for him to breathe.

_You will die for this. You will do more than die. I will send you into nothingness and not allow you to return._

Draco screamed. Harry's eyes popped open, but no matter how hard he stared, he couldn't see him. He tightened his hold on him and thought again of the tent. That was the only thing that might stop whatever pain Nihil was inflicting on Draco.

Warmth suddenly flooded around them, driving the cold away. Harry looked again and found himself sitting on the floor of the tent. Hermione was standing over them, reaching out to probe his head, and Raverat stood behind her, his face so white that Harry thought he was about to faint.

"A trap," he whispered. "There was a trap in Trainee Malfoy's mind, waiting for someone to spring it. I didn't know—I never meant—I hurt him."

"He is hurt," Hermione said, in a voice that was so careful Harry turned at once. "Tilt his head back, Harry, will you?"

Harry did it, swallowing hard enough to make his throat ache. There was a series of long parallel scratches on Draco's face, striking from his forehead down to his chin. Draco's head sagged, and if it hadn't been for the fact that he was still breathing, Harry would have thought he was dead.

Then he saw what Hermione and Raverat had already seen, and wanted to vomit.

Draco's left eye was gone. The scratches suggested the claws that had made them had simply scooped it out, whole, and tossed it somewhere into the middle distance.

Harry shut his own eyes and shook with sickness, revulsion, and fear. He didn't know what Nihil had meant to accomplish with this attack, but he knew what had resulted: Draco marked again, in a permanent way.

Hermione was saying something to him about a Healer. Harry couldn't listen. He didn't think he would faint, but the fear consumed him.


	23. Unacceptable Sacrifices

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Twenty-Three—Unacceptable Sacrifices_

Someone was in pain near him.

Draco struggled towards what he knew was the surface. It heaved and roiled above him, and hands grasped his legs, trying to pull him away from it. A cold, knowing voice whispered in his ear that he would regret it when he breathed air again. Far better to stay here, within the cold, knowing darkness, and to refuse and put off the pain he would feel.

But Draco had learned courage from Harry, and he couldn't stop using it merely because he was afraid. He pulled one more time, the hands fell away, and he broke the surface.

When he opened his eyes, he knew immediately that something was wrong, something more than the pain. Darkness pressed heavily on him. Magic sparked in the air around him, then faded, as though a barrier prevented it from touching the pain. A figure Draco could only see dimly started from the chair next to him and shouted for Portillo Lopez.

_Whatever happened, they can't share it with the rest of the Auror Healers who aren't our allies, _Draco thought, and was pleased with himself for coming to such a logical conclusion. He tried to roll his head sideways, but his brain was stuffed with cotton rags, and by the time he finished the motion, Portillo Lopez had arrived.

"Be still," she said at once, as though Draco was resisting her advice on purpose, and peered at him. "Do you remember what happened?"

"Another attack by Nihil," Draco said. He could put this into concrete words, he thought. He could summarize it. That kept him from remembering, too much, the hammering clutch of bony fingers on his body, or the way that Harry had fought to free them while he remained trapped behind some sort of wall. "What did it do to me?" It had to have done something nasty, more than normal, or there would be no reason for the tightness to Portillo Lopez's mouth.

Portillo Lopez hesitated. A ragged voice whispered from behind her, "Does he have to be troubled with that now? Let him sleep." Draco blinked in surprise when he recognized the voice as Harry's.

Something was wrong with the blink, too. Before Draco could figure it out, though, Portillo Lopez said, "He is the one who will have to live with it. I suggest you let him begin to try," and stepped away. When she came back, she held a mirror in her hand that she extended silently to him.

Draco stared. It was odd. The perspective was odd. The angle was odd. The light was odd. There was no other way to explain what he was seeing: the vivid scratches on his face, half-healed, and the empty socket behind the fluttering eyelid.

"No," he said. "The hands that held us were only illusion, or metaphor. Only something that Nihil imagined. Or else they were one of Nemo's beasts, but we've defeated them and escaped multiple times without injuries like this. No." He put up his hand, hesitated, and felt at his face with cautious fingers. He would touch something in a moment, he knew, that would disprove the tale of injury he saw in the mirror.

His fingers felt the eyelid. They pressed. There was no—

There was no give beneath it, no pressure, like there should have been.

Draco licked his lips. Harry made a sound like a sick dog. Draco sat up and reached for the mirror, and Portillo Lopez surrendered it without a fight. Draco sat there and stared at himself.

He was injured. Perhaps permanently, unless Healing magic could devise a way for him to get an eye back. Draco didn't know if it could. Some wounds were easy to fix, but then there was Mad-Eye Moody, who had lost an eye due to Dark magic. Nothing could cure it, which was why he'd had a magical eye instead.

_You could get a magical eye. _

The only thought in Draco's mind for long minutes, repeating like a drumbeat, was the odd one—but then, this whole day was odd—that he didn't want a magical eye like Moody's because it would make him uglier than he himself could bear.

"Draco, I'm so sorry."

Draco put out a hand mechanically, and Harry grabbed it and squeezed it as though that could reassure him. Draco shook his head. His tongue was metallic in his mouth, his head filled with memories. Strange memories, ordinary ones of the day before, but the difference was that he'd had two eyes then.

"I'm sorry," Harry repeated, and kissed his knuckles. Draco once would have been able to see him without turning his head, by nothing more than the flicker of motion that occurred in the corner of his eye. But now he couldn't do that. He had to cock his head and look in different ways to understand.

The walls seemed flat in new ways. The shadows were different. Draco had to wonder what this loss would cost him. Something more than it seemed it would right now, he thought, and licked his lips.

"If I could have saved you from this, I would have," Harry was continuing in a desperate, mindless way. It was all too obvious that he had no idea about the thoughts passing through Draco's head. "I would have taken it on myself if I could have. I'm so sorry."

"Shut up," Draco whispered, and Harry's voice cut off like the wail of a smothered child. Draco studied the mirror again, and then turned and looked up at Portillo Lopez, trying to see all the expressions that might be possible in her face this time, trying to force one eye to do the work of two. "Can you heal this? It was caused by the claws of a necromantic beast, so I don't know if you can."

"If it is possible," Portillo Lopez said carefully, "no one in my Order knows it."

Draco closed his eyes—eye. He would have to get used to thinking like that, he thought. He would have to get used to a lot of things being different now.

* * *

Harry was half-frantic.

He'd felt that way in the past, of course, notably when there was no way for him to help someone who would probably die in the next minute. It was part of the reason he had given Draco for dashing to the rescue in hopeless circumstances. Yes, he might die, but at least he wouldn't die of frustration.

Now, though, he'd felt the same way for hours on end. Draco hadn't said much since he woke up with only one eye; he nodded or shook his head in response to question, but he seemed to have shut down the part of his brain that would let him take in new information. Whenever Harry tried to apologize or ask anything about what Draco was going to do in the future, he turned away and sat there with a still face until Harry gave up.

This was a new Draco. This was someone he _had _to help, had to care for and help recover, but so far he could see no way to do that. There was no enemy to defeat. The enemy had come and gone, and if Harry had been the major force in driving them back in the end, it hadn't been in time to prevent the loss of Draco's eye.

He lay in bed beside Draco that night and stared at the ceiling of the tent. Time was limited, he knew. They had been able to conceal Draco so far tonight; after all, he had no classes to attend and they could keep the secret hidden among the people who were already loyal. But they would have to come up with some reason for his lost eye by tomorrow. Portillo Lopez had begun to discuss a glamour. Then she'd looked at Draco's face and said nothing else.

That was something he could do, Harry thought suddenly, brain fastening on the information like a starving cat on meat. He could come up with an excuse that would protect Draco, or a method that would protect Draco, and give him breathing room. He had the tools at hand. The only thing he had to find was the daring to use them.

The daring was there, in spades.

He sat up, and then sat considering for a moment. Draco had asked him to be careful if he could, and to think. Was there something else he could do? Something that didn't involve quite as much risk, something that would help Draco without exposing Harry's hand in it or endangering him?

The answer was quick.

_No. And if I wait too long, then we'll both be in more danger from my desire to help than we will be from my actions._

Harry smiled grimly as he rose to his feet and walked across the tent, aiming for the trunk that he and Draco concealed private things in, such as Snape's Pensieve. No one could say that he didn't know himself.

* * *

_Mother. I wish you were here._

Draco swallowed and rolled over. Harry's side of the bed was cold, but Draco had expected that. Harry had probably gone outside to stare at the stars and brood on what he could have done. Or else he was searching for a Time-Turner, to find a way to change the past.

Draco wished he wouldn't.

But there was no way to say that without sounding stupid or heartless. Did he _want _to have one eye? Did he _want _Harry to blame himself? No, and no. And no, he wasn't up to arguments about it right now, either. Draco simply had to shut his eyes—eye—and lie there with his heart pounding rather than yell, or move around too much. Move around, and Harry might realize he was awake and start his whispered entreaties again.

Draco knew what he wanted to hear. That Draco forgave him and knew he couldn't have done anything. That was the truth—

Maybe. Draco didn't know what he thought and felt about this right now. He couldn't remember enough to know if he blamed Harry or not. The experience was drowned in flashes of pain, as well as humiliation that Harry had been the one to rescue them yet _again._

Or maybe Harry would want the blame. He could kneel in front of Draco and ask for the flogging that would satisfy his masochistic instincts, his eyes wide and wet, and Draco could lash him with words, and Harry would writhe in ecstasy. He had the instincts of a hero sometimes and a martyr most of the time. He might even consider that he was more strongly bound to Draco now, from guilt and blame and the need to make up for something that hadn't been his fault in the first place.

Maybe. If Draco decided he didn't want to waste his time blaming Harry.

_A fine pair we make, _Draco decided sourly, and buried his head in his arms.

* * *

It hadn't taken long to find what he needed. After all, if Harry hadn't paid a great deal of attention to it at first, he had seen it around plenty of times now. He checked to make sure that it was still firmly under his arm, and then stepped forwards to confront the Aurors who guarded Holder's tent.

They came to attention and then stared at him. They hadn't expected to see a trainee, Harry knew, and especially not Harry Potter. He stood firmly and stared at them, and waited until the one on the left asked, "What are you doing here?"

"I have a message for Auror Holder." Harry was amazed at the sound of his voice. It was firm and confident, not undermined by the fine tremor that had begun to run through his muscles. Well, why not? He wasn't good at lying, but he was good at protecting, and he would risk a lot more than this for Draco.

The sentries glanced at each other, stared at him for some time more, and then simultaneously shook their heads. The one on the left, who seemed to have more initiative, muttered something and then ducked into the tent. The one on the right cleared his throat and tried to look threatening without having much in the way of threat that he could bother Harry with. Harry tried very, very hard to look as if he wasn't going to laugh.

The thought of what he carried under his arm and what had happened to Draco cured that impulse. The sentry took a step backwards, in fact, as if afraid of the expression on his face.

The second guard came out a short time later and said, "She'll see you, Trainee Potter." He put a lot of emphasis on "Trainee," as if that should remind Harry of his place, but he was holding the tent flap open like a servant, and Harry was still the one who walked past him with a regal little nod.

_You're crazy, _said the pounding of his heart in his ears. _This is crazy._

But it might also be the only way that they could help Draco. A glamour could be seen through, or disrupted by a carefully placed _Finite _from one of the Aurors—even one who didn't mean them any harm but just wanted to make sure that Draco didn't have an unfair advantage to help him in class. A magical eye might work, but Harry wasn't sure that Draco wanted one and they couldn't get one by tomorrow.

_Besides, it's not even so much the missing eye that's the problem, _Harry thought, as he jerked to a stop in front of Holder, _as the story we have to tell them._

Holder had risen to her feet and was studying him with a cool gaze that made Harry imagine she was never taken off-guard, not even in the middle of the night. He had seen her angry, he thought, but he had never seen her upset, really. She had a deep blue robe on that might be her sleeping robe. Harry shuddered and cut his imagination off before it could lead him in the direction of what she wore to bed.

"Trainee Potter," she said, and the guard's emphasis on his title was nothing compared to hers. "What message do you have for me? I can only think it one from Nihil, by the expression on your face, and yet you aren't writhing in agony from your broken oath. Interesting." She gave him a serpent's smile, and waited.

Harry located her wand—held in her hand, low by her hip—and decided to keep track of it. "It's a different kind of message," he said. "Not from Nihil, but from me. Of course, if I'd said that, then the guards never would have let me past."

To his astonishment, her smile broadened a bit and she bowed her head to him as if conceding the point. "That is true," she said. "You cannot know how many interesting points of gossip have passed me by because of the hesitation of my guards. I choose slightly stupid ones now as a matter of principle. What do you have to tell me?"

Harry said, "I want you to understand one thing first, before I offer the words."

"Then do tell me that." Holder's voice had grown one half-tone icier.

Harry held out the book into which Draco had copied the information he'd found in Holder and Robards's "real" book. It was less remarkable in appearance than the original, and so he didn't blame Holder for opening it with a look of boredom. Whatever she expected to find in it, it obviously wasn't what she found.

She went so still that Harry's wand hand rose almost of its own accord. He'd seen people look like that right before they tried to kill him. But she only breathed out and tilted backwards, balancing her weight on her heels, as she stared at him. Then she said, "I _see_."

Harry felt his jaw drop. He had expected to cringe at her tone of voice. It would be so filled with hatred and anger, he thought, that he would fight not to run away.

Instead, Holder sounded—_amused_.

"What?" he asked stupidly, and her eyebrows rose in a derisive flick that he flinched from for other reasons. He kept his wand trained on her, though. Maybe this was a means of getting him to stumble around in a daze so she could attack.

"You were smarter than I thought you were," she said, and her voice this time was pleased. Harry resisted the urge to thump his head or pinch his arm. He wasn't dreaming. If he was dreaming, then nothing would ever have happened to Draco, because he could wake from a nightmare that bad. "I did not know that anyone realized the existence of the book, let alone that of false information we are feeding the Aurors. We should have guarded its existence better. Since you won the game, I have no recourse but to allow myself to be checkmated."

"Er, right," Harry said, and made the careful decision never, ever to tell Holder that the book's discovery had been an accident. "So. You know what this could do to you if we wanted to expose the information."

Holder sighed. "It is called blackmail, Mr. Potter." Harry wondered if she'd demoted him already in her mind. On the other hand, from her, maybe Mr. was a better title than Trainee. "I recognize it, of course. The question that remains is what you want me to do because of it."

"You won't lie and say that we found something that doesn't implicate you?" Harry asked cautiously. He would at least have tried denial, if it was him.

"With Veritaserum and the other means of finding out the truth, they would know who was lying and who was not soon enough," Holder said calmly. "We should have tried to prepare ourselves better for such an eventuality. We did not. On our heads be it." Perhaps sensing Harry's still-great incredulity, she shook her head and said, "One should suffer for one's stupidity."

Harry swallowed and nodded. _I reckon I should just be glad that she's as much a bitch to herself as she is to anyone else. _"Uh. Well. I want you to know that we've been acting on our own again, and now we need to explain to you what's been happening. But if you try to arrest us, torture us, or do anything else because we acted independently, then we have this." He hefted the book.

"I think this is your technique, and not your partner's," Holder said conversationally. "It has your flavor to it."

"That doesn't really matter," Harry said, and glared at her. He thought the glare was stone-cold, but Holder didn't seem impressed, so it was possible that it wasn't. "Are you going to listen to me, or not?"

Holder nodded. "Go on."

"We've discovered that Nihil can create balls of nothingness that devour a small part of the world," Harry said. "Create enough of them and he can accomplish his goal of destroying everything so that he doesn't have a body to reincarnate himself into. He wants to stop living, but he can't do that as long as he has the ability to survive death."

Holder let her eyelids droop almost shut. Harry knew she was listening, though. He would have been foolish to mistake the expression on her face for anything else. "Go on."

"In a conflict with Nihil today," Harry said tightly, "Draco lost an eye. We can't hide this injury. We're counting on you to come up with an explanation, and hide the more sensitive parts of the fight so that people who really don't _need _to know, like the ones who would panic or betray us to Nihil, don't learn about it. So. What are you going to do?"

"An eye," Holder said, not with the sound of disbelief, but with a force that Harry thought was meant to help her commit her words to memory.

Harry nodded. "Scooped out by one of Nemo's beasts."

Holder turned and stared at the wall of the tent as though she assumed something was written there that would help her. "An eye," she repeated.

"Do you understand what I said or not?" Harry demanded. "I wanted an alliance with you, so that you could help ease the stares and questions Draco's going to get, and I was willing to share a bit of information, but maybe I should go and do that with someone who knows what the word 'eye' means."

"Hush, Potter," Holder said, in the gentlest tone that he had ever heard from her. "I am saying that to fix it in my mind." She rose to her feet and prowled over so that she was near the fire burning in the brazier. She stared into the flames and raised her wand.

Harry flinched and prepared to cast a curse at her back, but she only flicked out a spell that made the fire explode in a roaring cascade of sparks. Holder thrust her hands into the sparks. Harry hissed, but if she felt any pain, she didn't show it. She simply stood there until the sparks had all fallen on the floor and then turned around.

"Nihil has taken something from one of our trainees that he should not have had to give up," she said quietly. "He might have died in battle. He chose to take the risks himself when he fetched the base for our weapons out of the void." Harry started; he hadn't realized she knew about that. "But this is an unacceptable sacrifice. You could have come and told me about it, and I would have gone to war without the blackmail."

Harry had no response to that except to roll his eyes. "You've given us no reason to trust you," he said.

"Yes," Holder said. "I know. I still think you dangerously unstable, but I reckon saviors must be." She started towards the tent flap.

Harry leveled his wand at her. "What are you going to do about Draco?" he demanded.

"Tell everyone enough of the truth to sweeten the blow," Holder said. "And enough lies to make it seem as if he earned the injury in his service to us. I must awaken Gawain."

"Is he going to agree to this?" Harry asked. He could hardly believe that _Holder _had agreed to this. He knew it had been a mad plan, going to her. Her standards extended even to herself, it seemed, and that was the reason it had worked.

Holder stared at him as if he was the one who had trouble with comprehension, repeated, "This is an unacceptable sacrifice," and then turned around and ducked out of the tent.

Harry stood there, licking his lips and shaking. But no one came back and hit him with a curse or tried to steal the book, and when he checked, it still had writing on its pages.

He returned to the tent in a daze. Draco might not be happy with him in the morning, but at the very least, he would have an easier time of it now. There would be fewer stares and whispers; Holder and Robards would keep others fixed on the war with Nihil, not on the mystery of how Draco had earned that injury.

And they had the support of Robards and Holder, coerced though it was, for what it was worth.

Harry was starting to think that it might be worth more than he imagined.

He put the book back in its trunk, crawled in beside Draco, and closed his eyes. Nothing much had changed, but the roaring panic in his belly had shut up.


	24. In Motion

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Twenty-Four—In Motion_

"You did _what_."

It wasn't a question. Harry didn't care. He lifted his eyebrows at Draco and went on eating his eggs, almost shoveling them down his throat. He had the feeling that he should, because he might not get much more to eat if Draco leaped across the table and attacked him the way Harry thought he would. "I went to Holder, and she agreed that she and Robards would tell everyone that you'd earned the wound in their service and with their cooperation," he said. "And spin lies that would keep people from questioning you."

Draco banged his spoon down into the middle of the table. Harry wasn't sure if he had meant to do that—Draco's lost eye was still giving him trouble with perspective—but he didn't comment on it. Draco had leaped to his feet and leaned forwards, and that was more pressing.

"We cannot trust them," Draco whispered. "This is a betrayal. I can't believe I trusted you. First I trusted that I wouldn't come to harm if I let Raverat look into my mind, as you advised, and that was proved false. And now this. Why do I stay with you?" He whirled away, one hand shooting out to grip the table so he didn't fall.

Harry could understand Draco's grief and pain, especially when there wasn't any proof yet that they would be able to heal those scars on his face or restore his eye. But he wasn't going to let the accusations against Raverat go unanswered.

"Raverat triggered a trap that Nemo left there," he answered evenly, pausing to swallow another mouthful of eggs. "He didn't do that himself."

"You have no _proof!_" Draco turned around again, his expression distorted by rage and pain. "You have no proof that Granger is a Seer, except that he said she was! You have no proof that these dreams about the removal of bones mean Nihil is happy, except what he says! You _can't trust him_."

Harry rose to his feet and moved around the table, trying to keep his anger and his sympathy properly balanced. He didn't want to argue with everything Draco was saying _or _give in just because he felt sorry for him. That would start a trend that wouldn't be easy to get rid of. "I trust Portillo Lopez," he said. "And I think she would know if someone in her Order served a necromancer like Nihil."

Draco shook his head, a crazed, sad smile on his lips. "She might be untrustworthy too, for all we know. And Ketchum. He was the one who made us swear the oath that we wouldn't serve Nihil. What if it's false? What if everyone in the camp could be a spy, and we couldn't know it?"

He reached up with one hand to the scars on his face, and Harry jumped over the table and pinned his arms to his sides.

Draco started and stared at him, breath quickening. "What are you doing?" he asked, in a voice that was a bit calmer than it had been. "Afraid that I'll feel the scars and find out for myself how ugly I look?"

"You can find out what the scars look like in any mirror," Harry said. He wanted to scream, too, but it would do no good to have _two _of them hysterical. "And I don't think you're ugly—"

"Of course you do," Draco said. "Of course you do. Your face wasn't the one marked, and you can't help but look at me and then let your eyes flinch away every time you do. You'll see these scars as a reminder of how stupid I was for the rest of my life, and that will make me less attractive to you." He was fighting Harry's grip by now, fingers curving and hooking in the way that Harry was afraid of, because he might reach up and scratch at the scars.

Harry shifted and threw Draco off-balance, so that he sank back into his abandoned chair. By the time that Draco reached up to do the same thing to him, Harry had got his right hand to its goal. He had lifted his fringe and turned so that Draco's remaining eye could focus on the scar that decorated his forehead.

Draco stared long enough that Harry wondered if he was simply having trouble seeing, and then turned his head to the side and shut his eye. "It's not the same thing," he said, voice muffled. "Your scar can be concealed by your hair, and now people think of it as a badge of heroism."

"I can't do anything about what others will think of you, except offer to duel them if they insult you to your face," Harry said calmly. He took Draco's arm again, though this time Draco seemed less inclined to struggle. "We were talking about you and me. I don't think you're ugly. I have a scar that I got from a Dark force, too, and to think that you were stupid for having yours, I'd have to think I was stupid for having mine."

"Yes, but yours was earned when you were just a baby," Draco said. He was mumbling now. His head drooped as if he was exhausted.

"I know that," Harry said. "But you're simultaneously accusing Raverat of being a traitor and saying that your scars are your fault. So I don't know what you think or what to do." He tried to convert his clamp on Draco's arms to soothing strokes.

The mention of Raverat jerked Draco's head up again as if it was on strings. "I think he is," he said sharply. "You don't. I was referring to the fact that you _must _think the scars are my fault because you don't believe he gave them to me on purpose."

"No," Harry said. "I trust him, so I think this was the result of a trap springing. This is no one's fault, except the fault of Nihil and whatever beast he was using to lift us in the first place. And even then, I don't think Nihil meant to leave us alive. He meant to do something worse, and you helped me in getting free. It was accidental, and I'll always think of it that way."

"Yes, of course you will." Draco's voice was thick now, and he was straining against the back of the chair as if he wanted to get away from Harry's hands. "You won't even cooperate with me in investigating Raverat."

Harry took a deep breath and knelt down in front of Draco. As he had hoped would happen, the change in posture brought Draco's eye open, and he stared bleakly at Harry, the eyelid over the empty socket fluttering up and down for a moment as though he was opening it in sheer reflex.

"If it means that much to you, and you really think that he could be a traitor or someone who did this to you on purpose," Harry said quietly, "then I will."

Draco breathed instead of saying anything for several minutes. Then he shook his head. "But you'll have some hidden sympathy for him," he muttered. "If we found evidence, then you would insist on waiting instead of confronting him with it."

Harry nodded. "I _would _insist on waiting, but that's because we would need Portillo Lopez to interpret it, I think. Not because I wouldn't want to publicize it or because I would trust him more than you. Yes, I would feel strongly, but it would be shock and horror and disgust. My primary loyalty is to you, Draco. Always. I'll do anything you need me to do."

Draco looked away. Harry watched him and thought about how the scars and the loss of his eye changed his face, but didn't endanger Harry's ability to read it. Harry was glad that they'd got so close before the damage, if only for Draco's sake.

"Then let me go," Draco whispered.

Harry watched him for some time, judged that the dangerous moment when he might have clawed at his face was past, and stood up and moved backwards. Draco watched him go with a complex expression that Harry didn't know how to interpret until he murmured, "Even then, you thought about it before you reacted. So much for doing as I needed, even when what I need is freedom."

Harry sighed. "You _wanted _freedom. I had to be sure that you really needed it. I have no problem knocking you down and sitting on you as well as doing what you tell me, because sometimes you'll need one thing and sometimes you'll need the other."

Draco gave a disgusted huffing noise and flopped back in his chair, picking at his fingernails. "When did _you_ get so adult?" he muttered. Harry had to half-close his eyes with relief, because the tone in Draco's voice was an old and familiar one.

"Among other things, when this happened," he said quietly. He thought of asking whether Draco had considered a magical eye, but given the way Draco's shoulders had stiffened at his words, he didn't think it was the best idea. "So. Do you want to go out and face people yet, or not?"

"I'm going to be sick today," Draco said, and closed his eyes as if he could feel the sickness coming on even while he said that.

"All right," Harry said. He knew what he would do in a situation like this, especially one where Holder and Robards had promised their protection, but he wasn't Draco, and he also knew that Holder and Robards hadn't actually come through and proved they would keep their word yet. He let his hand brush briefly across Draco's shoulder for a moment before he turned and left the tent.

* * *

"I don't know."

Draco ground his teeth. How hard was _one _question to answer? He had simply asked whether he could have a magical eye put in or the old one regrown, which would depend on Portillo Lopez and her Order being able to find out whether this wound was the product of necromantic magic too strong to overcome. And Portillo Lopez still looked at him with flat eyes and refused to tell him.

"Fine," he said, getting up and turning towards his bed. The distances seemed to sway before they stabilized. Draco shook his head. What he hated most of all about his eye being gone was his inability to judge things the way he had before: distances, words on a page, the relative position of objects to one another.

Portillo Lopez, and Granger, had both assured him that it would get better and the remaining eye would, if not compensate, get stronger to take up the other eye's slack. That he would learn how to use it better, Draco had no doubt. He'd always been stubborn. But he didn't think that his eye would really get stronger. That was the kind of comforting, hopeful thing that you said to a wounded child, not an adult.

"You must realize that this only happened yesterday," Portillo Lopez said. "There is so much that we don't know yet."

Draco turned his head back to glare at her, and promptly barked his shin on the bed. Portillo Lopez, luckily, had the kind of face that could cover up mirth with a serious expression, so she didn't laugh at him. Not that he might have been able to tell if she was, Draco thought, enraged and frustrated. Perhaps what he hated most of all about the weakness of this eye was the inability to read the subtle changes in faces he had always relied on. "You collected skin from the scars. When will you know?"

"There is something else I could do that might lead to faster answers," Portillo Lopez said. "I did not want to do it at first because I thought the request insensitive."

Draco could only stare at her with his mouth open. There was something that _Portillo Lopez _thought too much to ask? But he realized that he probably looked like an idiot, so he slammed his mouth shut, took a deep breath, and demanded, "What, then?"

"Taking skin from the socket itself," Portillo Lopez said. "I was hardly about to ask you yesterday, with your protective friends nearby. I will ask you now." She withdrew a vial and a scraping instrument of some kind from under her robes and held them up to Draco as if they should be a guarantee of her good faith.

Draco watched her, as much as he could with his eye, and swallowed. "Will it hurt?" he asked. "I think I've endured enough pain." He tried to make the second sentence as haughty as possible, to take away from the vulnerability that he knew the first expressed.

"It will," said Portillo Lopez. "I shall try to be as gentle as possible so that it does not provoke a return of the pain from the attack, of course."

Draco flinched as he thought about that. He admittedly didn't remember much about the pain, which had knocked him unconscious so quickly that he'd had to rely on Harry for the details, but the thought of confronting it again made him have to grip the bed. On the other hand, he wanted answers.

"I give you permission," he said, and stepped closer to Portillo Lopez. He could feel his eyelid over the socket fluttering spasmodically, and he knew that he probably looked like even more of an idiot than he had standing there with his mouth open. No, perhaps what he hated most about having the eye gone was _this_: not being able to know what he looked like and so fool his enemies with a smooth mask the way his father had taught him to do.

Of course, Harry might say that he had no enemies among the Aurors right now except for any who served Nihil. Draco wasn't sure about that. It had yet to be proven that Robards and Holder would keep their word.

Portillo Lopez lifted the eyelid and then reached out with the scraper. Draco flinched, but her voice said, cold and remote, "Careful, unless you want me to take your other eye."

The sudden fear of blindness was paralyzing. Draco held still, and though it hurt when the scraper removed some of the skin that lay in the socket, he couldn't actually see anything and the pain was minute—the kind he would feel from pricking his finger with a needle. Portillo Lopez stepped back and dipped the scraper into the vial. Draco thought he saw a few flakes of skin fall into it, but wasn't sure.

"Good," she said, and nodded to him. "There is a ritual I need to perform that will require the help of some of the other members of my Order, but I should have answers for you this evening." She turned and left.

Alone, Draco found that his resolution of going to bed wouldn't hold out, and neither would the one he had half-made when Harry left, to sit around and feel sorry for himself. He got out a book and tried to read, but the words swam on the page and his remaining eye began to hurt. He closed it and leaned back with his head on the chair, eye closed.

_How could this have happened?_

Of course, he had theories of his own, even if no one had asked for them yet. They all, including Harry, wanted to treat him like he was some sort of helpless victim, but Draco's mind was working as well as ever under the blanket of shock and despair. He could think, and he had come up with an explanation that made sense for the attack.

Nihil could no longer get through the barriers in the same way that he had when Nusquam was alive. That left out Apparating out the beasts into the camp. But he could have a beast that would attack through the mental space, or from a distance. Draco thought the trap left in his mind by Nemo—if it had ever been real, if Raverat wasn't a traitor—had sent out a call to one of those beasts. The bony hands holding him had belonged to an animal, not a human; the number of fingers had been wrong. Those yellow sparks he'd seen could have been eyes. And the living dead didn't have hands or eyes like that.

That meant that cornering the beast and finding out what it had been, and how it had stolen his eye, might give him the chance to get it back.

Draco flexed his hand on the arm of the chair and opened his eye, wishing now that he hadn't been so hasty as to destroy or ban all the necromancy books Harry had found. If he could discover a real way of calling up the beasts and making them obey him, he could get the answers more quickly.

"Trainee Malfoy?"

Draco was on his feet in instants, keeping one hand locked in place on the chair so that he wouldn't stumble. None of the people who called him by that title were ones that he wanted to look weak in front of, and this was not Portillo Lopez's voice, so it wasn't magically evening yet.

Raverat stood in the flap of the tent, looking at him with pity. Draco had learned to recognize _that _expression, at least, as well as the little flinch that came when someone glanced at his scars. He stepped forwards with his hand out. "I wanted to—"

"You had your chance to ruin me." Draco barely recognized his own voice. It was a low snarl from the bottom of his throat, and it sounded as threatening as the cry of the beast that had crippled him might have. "Get out."

"I came to apologize," Raverat said. His head was turned now, and Draco thought with sour amusement that he couldn't even look at the results of his work. "I never meant to do that. But it was a trap that Nihil sent. It was not deliberate. I wanted you to know that. Please—"

"Leave," Draco said, and reached back until he found his wand. A murmur detached a chunk of wood from the bed, and he flung it in Raverat's direction. But of course his aim was off, and Raverat simply ducked, a soft look of shock replacing the more complex expression on his face.

"You're being irrational," he said.

"You lose an eye and we'll see how fucking _rational _you are," Draco snarled. He thought for a moment of what would happen if Harry or Portillo Lopez walked in right now, how he would look. But he dismissed the notion from his mind. He probably wouldn't be able to tell what he looked like anyway, given his lack of control over his face now. So he might as well enjoy acting like a madman.

"It was a trap," Raverat said. "I was trying to help you. I had no notion that triggering the trap would do something like that! And Trainee Granger and I tried to reach you when you and Trainee Potter were in the clutches of that animal. We simply couldn't. Please. I only wish to apologize."

Draco felt absurdly gratified for a moment that someone else had realized that an animal, and not one of the living dead, was holding him. Portillo Lopez had spoken as if a giant skeleton that Nihil had resurrected was the only possible candidate.

Then he remembered that he couldn't trust Raverat anyway, which meant he couldn't trust his opinion about the beast that had picked him up, and he chopped loose another chunk of wood and held it ready to throw.

"We can't trust you," he said. "You could have lied about all of this, and how are we to tell, when no one but you can feel these magical sensitivities in the brain? Leave. I have no reason to speak to you."

Raverat flinched for a moment, as if that accusation of blame, alone among all of them, had gone home. But then he took a deep breath and shook his head. "You _have _to listen to me," he said. "There's something I didn't tell you."

"Unsurprising," Draco drawled, but he felt his stomach flip. For the first time since Raverat had entered, he wished Harry was here.

Raverat sighed. "It was something I only realized today, and that's the reason I came—"

"Obviating that need to apologize that you claimed as your reason for coming a moment ago," Draco murmured.

Raverat flinched and looked miserable. Draco was glad. He wondered if he could damage Raverat further. Throwing pieces of wood or casting curses wasn't as satisfying as hurting someone with words. That left no wounds like the ones on his face, but it would lacerate Raverat in a way that no one else could blame him for.

Or _should _Draco hold out for physical injuries like the kind that he bore now, and refuse to accept any other recompense as equal?

"I came for both reasons," Raverat said. "But even if you won't accept my apology, even if you have no reason to do so, I hope that you'll still accept my explanation. It could make the difference between healing and not healing."

Draco was tempted to respond with another flood of poison, to say that he would never heal and he didn't understand what Raverat meant by it, but his curiosity—and the stupid hope that still flourished in the center of his soul despite the unencouraging comments from Portillo Lopez—won out. He put down the chunk of wood and nodded for Raverat to come in and sit down. He himself remained on his feet, although safely in the same place.

"I was looking at the notes that I made after you were injured," Raverat said, "when I was writing down everything I could remember as soon as I could, so that I wouldn't lose those impressions later. I thought they might be of some value."

Draco nodded in grudging respect. Harry might have thought it was heartless to make notes so soon after an accident—if it was an accident—like this, but Draco knew that one's intellectual curiosity didn't die so easily, most of the time.

"I wrote down that, right before the trap triggered, I saw the vision of a beast with many eyes and long arms," Raverat said. "It vanished when the trap flipped, and then of course I thought I saw the same thing pick you up. But it's telling that Nemo felt the urge to place an image like that in your mind instead of letting it be a surprise. Had I known what it meant at the time, I would have been able to back away and warn you."

Draco thought, and then decided that the amount of self-loathing in his voice was right and didn't need to be increased right now. "What does it mean, then?"

"I think the placing of the image was involuntary, rather like the placing of the images of stripping Granger of her bones," Raverat said. "It was a stupid attack to make, when it warned her that something was happening. If Nihil had wanted to control her mind, he would have been more subtle. It makes sense only as an involuntary emanation of the enemy's emotions, and I think this is the same way."

"Yet it came to life," Draco said, and kept his voice empty of inflection, because that made Raverat look more haunted.

"Yes." Raverat shook his head. "But even if was meant to come to life, there was no need to warn us about it."

Draco considered that theory and decided that he could accept it. Yet—"Nemo was stupid enough to place such an image," he said. "Even if Nihil wasn't."

"Nemo, I theorize, is a concentration of brute strength in one particular area, in this case raising beasts," Raverat said. "He is stupid in the same way that an instinctive animal is stupid, or the absent-minded geniuses that one reads about sometimes. Brilliant in his particular area, considerably less brilliant at everything outside it. This trap was within his area. He would have known how to set it without that particular image."

Draco grunted. "Then why?"

"His fear and surprise when Trainee Potter and you managed to subdue him must have been great," Raverat said. His words were careful. Draco wondered if that was because he didn't want to betray his true loyalties or because the concept was actually complicated enough to require considered writing. "The beast was the first one he thought of. The surprise and fear, combined into a desire for revenge, might have been enough to create that image. He was anticipating what would happen when you ran into it."

Draco ran his fingers over his scars for the pleasure of seeing Raverat wince again. He had to learn their lines, too, he thought, their force and direction. It was the first step towards regaining control of his expression. "Then explain why this matters. It's all just speculation, and not explanation for the loss of my eye."

Raverat leaned forwards, his smile grim. "We don't have direct access to Nihil to ask him what he's happy about. But we _do _have Nemo here, to ask him questions about the beast, what it is and does."


	25. United

Thanks again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Twenty-Five—United_

Harry was aware of eyes on him when he walked into his class with Weston and Lowell by himself, and for unusual reasons as well as the usual ones. He acted as though he didn't see the stares, at least as best he could when he didn't know what Robards and Holder had told anyone yet, and took his regular place in the forming circle.

"Where is your partner, Trainee Potter?" Weston looked at him with narrowed eyes, leaning against air. Lowell, behind her, was talking with Herricks. Harry had no doubt that Lowell was listening to the conversation despite the fact that he was apparently focused on something else. Weston and Lowell were a pair; what one knew, the other did.

"Sick," Harry said. "Because of rumors that you may have heard." He thought the insinuation should be safe either way. If Robards and Holder had said nothing yet, they would soon; if they had started to spread rumors, then Harry would be covered.

Lowell jerked a little, but his voice in the running monologue to Herricks remained calm. Weston shrugged and stood straighter. "You'll be unable to participate in most of the exercises we've chosen for today."

"I know that," Harry said, and stared at her until she looked away and began speaking with some of the other partnerships.

Ron worked his way around the circle, necessarily tugging Hermione with him, until he stood next to Harry. Hermione attended to Weston's lecture with annoyance seeming to bristle off her while Ron whispered to Harry in an undertone, "How is he, mate?"

"Not used to it yet," Harry said. He flashed Ron a brief smile. It wasn't as though Ron had any particular reason to care about Draco, except that he was Harry's boyfriend and partner. "Would you be?"

Ron grimaced and scratched the back of his neck, then straightened up and nodded so that he could pretend he'd been paying attention to Weston's advice. When he turned back to Harry, his face was grim. "Do they know what happened to his eye? I'd hate to think of it ending up the way Moody's did, or worse."

Harry shuddered. The memory of Moody's magical eye stuck in Umbridge's door was hardly one of his worst memories of the war, but he thought it might become so now that Draco had lost one. "They don't know yet," he said. "I think it's one of the things that Portillo Lopez and Raverat are working to find out."

Ron probably would have asked another question, but Weston called out for him and Hermione to demonstrate a technique at that moment, and they had to shuffle into the middle of the circle. Ron shuffled, at least; Hermione walked as though someone had stuck a poker up her arse. Harry reckoned that she didn't think the wounding of someone else in the comitatus a sufficient excuse for not paying attention in class.

"Can he still lead us?"

Apparently, it was Harry's fate not to be able to learn what Weston and Lowell were teaching that day. He blinked and turned to Ventus. She rarely approached him outside the comitatus, but it made sense that she would want to know now. In fact, Harry was surprised that she hadn't visited Draco yet. Perhaps it was a touch of sensitivity or (more likely, knowing Ventus) she wanted the answer only to her question and not anything else that Draco might be able to tell her.

"I think so," Harry said. He kept one eye on the back of Weston's head, which often seemed to spasm before she turned around and pinned you with a deadly stare for talking in her class. "He's not—not himself, yet, obviously, but he has the will and the strength to survive something like this and pull himself back together."

"But the loss of an eye will damage his ability in battle." That was Herricks, behind Ventus. He had picked up Weston's trick of leaning against thin air and did it now as he studied Harry with an intense frown. "_Can _he retain the leadership of the comitatus? He might want to, but whether he could do it in such a way that he benefits us is another question."

Harry bit the inside of his cheek in a way that he hoped would keep him from shouting. He had never cared as much about Herricks as Draco did, but at the moment, he could see how one might dislike him.

"I don't know yet," he said, because it was the only answer he could give that was true to Draco but would keep Herricks from arguing. "Yes, he lost the eye. That doesn't mean that he lost all knowledge of how to fight along with it. And I don't know how high the war is on his list of priorities right now." _High, perhaps, with the need to get revenge on Nihil. _But Harry was not about to tell something so private to other people.

"He'll win and survive and come through," said Ventus, with the comfortable assurance that Harry had seen in her before. Sometimes he thought she willed her own reality into being, by being so confident that she simply refused to accept anything else. "Some of the greatest generals in the past have been wounded by Dark curses and still struggled on. You must remember Mad-Eye Moody." She turned to Herricks with a faint smile, inviting him to agree with her. Harry wondered what would happen if someone disagreed with her when she looked like that. He might be interested in finding out, but only if he could stand some distance away.

"Yes, he might," Herricks said. "But _coming through _doesn't help a lot when we have a war to fight now, does it?" His gaze was cold and intense as he leaned towards Harry. "You tell him that it's not shameful to lean on others and delegate some tasks to other people."

"I'll tell him," Harry said, lying, for the first time, without a telltale stammer or his face turning red. He disliked Herricks enough at the moment that the lie sprang more naturally to his lips than the truth.

Herricks started to say something else, but two things happened that prevented him: Weston swung around and glared, and Holder strode through the ragged circle of trainees into the center.

All attention focused on her. Harry decided, later, that that must have really irritated Weston, since it was the moment she had probably counted on launching some blistering admonition about paying attention in her class.

Weston and Lowell came to attention. The trainees scrambled closer together and tried to stand up as straight as veteran soldiers. Ventus stared thoughtfully, her hand falling down to her wand. Hermione jerked nervously, as though her secrets were written on her face. Ron, Harry noticed, was the only one who had an uncomplicated reaction. He would have liked to pound Holder into the ground with his fists, and he didn't care if she knew it.

Harry wasn't sure what his own face looked like, but Holder seemed to have anticipated any reaction. When she turned in a slow circle and caught sight of him, she nodded judiciously and beckoned with one finger. Harry's face flamed, but he walked towards her. If she tried to humiliate him in public, he would probably have to go along with it, at least as long as it was part of the cover-up for Draco's injury.

_And would I be able to perceive in time that it's not?_

When he stopped in front of her, Holder looked him up and down as if she had expected to find more meat on his bones. Then she said in a soft but carrying voice, "You may tell your partner, Trainee Potter, that his sacrifice shall not go unrewarded."

Harry took a deep breath. He had to make a guess about how to react, and he wished Draco was at his side to make it more certain. "Will you be able to give him a new eye, ma'am? Or don't you know yet?"

"The sacrifices themselves may be mentioned in public," Holder said. "I think the rewards a matter for privacy." She laid a hand on Harry's arm, and Harry was so shocked that he nearly forgot to notice how cold and thin her fingers were. "But know that we are proud of you. No one has done more in the war than you have."

She stalked off the same way she had come, cloak flying behind her like a banner. Most people stared. A few more edged away from Harry as if Holder's favor was a catching disease.

"What did she _mean_?" Herricks demanded.

"Perhaps you would have some idea if you ever listened for the _meanings _of words, Trainee Herricks," Weston said.

Harry started to grin, because he could feel the strength of her desire to say that from here. But then Weston turned around and gave him a remote look, and Harry winced and stepped back. He knew the next words out of her mouth would be as devastating, but this time, they would be aimed at him.

Lowell touched Weston's arm and shook his head.

Weston didn't turn to look at him, but by this time, Harry knew that didn't mean anything. She studied Harry in a moment of long, posed silence instead, then turned away and said in cold tones, "Everyone should come nearer the center of the ring and listen carefully to our instructions. We will not repeat them."

Harry was glad to crowd around with the others. He didn't yet know what the consequences of Holder's actions, and his, would be; he hoped that Draco was able to live with them. Harry had thought he could survive almost anything, but Draco seemed more fragile to him, now.

* * *

"I want to know what kind of trap you laid."

Nemo had been asleep when Draco and Raverat had come into the tent where he was being held, but he snapped awake at the words, quivering. Draco stood staring down at him and wondering how much of the wards and enchantments that held him were really strange and how many were simply distorted by the sight of his single eye.

Silver chains linked Nemo's wrists, so light that he probably couldn't feel them, but Draco saw the thorns coming out of the cuffs. A heavy pair of iron blocks encased his feet. Blue light hummed around his head. There was also a stifling presence in the tent, like incense, that Draco couldn't see. He thought that was probably the spell Gregory had discovered that would cut off contact between a Dark Lord and his followers.

"I don't have to answer to someone like you." Nemo's voice had no strength, and his nose twitched like a rabbit's.

Draco crouched down in front of him. He had no fear of falling over and looking ridiculous, although his legs had begun to tremble with the exertion of squatting like this almost the moment he did it. He thought he was still not fully recovered from the beast's attack. But what he _felt _at the moment was sharp and cold and focused. He would get answers out of Nemo, and he didn't care what it took to get them.

"I'm sure you don't," he said. "But you're going to." He glanced at Raverat, who simply studied Nemo grimly and gave him no help. Draco decided that he could risk one of the spells he wanted to use. He took up his wand and aimed it at a bare patch of skin on Nemo's leg, above where the iron block ended.

Nemo leaped and cried out in agony as Draco's spell took effect. He tried to reach down and scratch the exposed patch of skin, but the chains prevented his hands from getting near it. He twisted around and stared at Draco, his nose twitching in panic and his eyes darting from side to side.

"What did you do?" he whispered. "I can feel beast magic of any kind. What did you set on me?"

Draco gave him a serene smile. "It hurts, doesn't it?" he asked, not answering otherwise. The spell didn't really implant a burrowing insect under someone's skin. It only felt like it. But the pain and the burning and the itch would grow until the caster took the spell off. Draco didn't think it was as brutal as some of the torture that Gregory would have inflicted on Nemo. That didn't matter, given how annoying the sensation could be and how it would baffle Nemo by intruding on his area of expertise.

Nemo twisted, trying vainly to turn the leg so that he could see it. "I demand that you stop this," he said. "I demand that you release me."

"Of course you do," Draco said, and bounced his wand in his hand, and smiled.

"What do you _want_?" Nemo bowed his head and shuffled in a cramped circle, trying to hitch the leg up so that it would reach his chains and scratch itself. Draco laughed. Nemo heard him and froze, shoulders hunched and shaking. "What do you want?" he repeated in a lower voice. "I don't know what Nihil might have done now that I'm not with him. I keep telling you that. You don't listen. I don't _know_."

"I want to know what kind of beast has bony claws and lights of eyes that fill the darkness with fire," Draco said.

Nemo turned his head towards him. His face held more intelligence than it had a moment ago, though ripples running beneath the surface indicated that Draco's spell was still functioning. "I won't tell you," he said.

Draco shrugged and cast the spell again, this time on an unguarded patch of skin on the back of Nemo's hand. It hurt even more there, or so his father had assured him. Nemo rubbed his hand furiously on the floor.

"More of that until you tell me," Draco said.

Raverat made a little noise in the back of his throat. Draco glanced at him curiously. If he had thought the man would be trouble, he would never have brought him along. He had made the suggestion and led the way, and hadn't left yet, so Draco had assumed that he could stand torture. Instead, his eyes were fastened on Nemo's body as thought he had never seen anything so horrifying.

"I don't know," Nemo said, and his voice rose into a wail. "You can't make me. Why is this so hard for you to understand? I'm a part of Nihil, and I obey only him. I can't tell you what he won't allow me to tell you."

Draco didn't believe that for an instant, since Nemo's refusals up until that point had been a matter of willful denial. He cast the spell on Nemo's cheek, and Nemo screamed this time. Draco smiled. He didn't think the spell that bad. What it did was trap Nemo in a cycle of pain that he couldn't escape by ordinary measures, and Nemo was part of Nihil. Pain that he couldn't escape frightened and enraged him as nothing else did, given the experience of part of him under the hands of Death Eater torturers.

"No! No! No!" Nemo was flailing about, and Draco would have been worried that someone else would hear his cries, but he had checked the silencing wards on the tent when they came in. "You can't—what _is _it? You have to get them out! You have to leave me alone!"

"I know that you can tell me the name of the beast, if you want to," Draco said. "You're the one who would know, since you raised them for Nihil. And you're cut off from him. He won't know if you tell me."

Nemo's screams filled the silence between them, and nothing else. Draco thought he would succumb eventually. He leaned back on his heels and waited, turning his head from side to side so that he could get a sense of the whole tent. He hated the restriction of his peripheral vision that happened with one eye gone.

"Must you be so cold?" Raverat whispered.

Draco looked at him. "What?" Perhaps the expression on Raverat's face was part of the distortion, too, but Draco didn't think so.

"The others at least appeared grim or determined," Raverat whispered. "You look as though you enjoy what you're doing to him."

Draco shook his head. "I'm enjoying my revenge on the only part of Nihil that I can reach right now, and Nihil is responsible for my condition. I do want the answers to those questions, yes, but that's a secondary concern." He sneered then. "Unless you're going to tell me that I should waste sympathy on someone who would do _this_ to me." He gestured angrily at his face.

Raverat looked stern and grave, as though he knew the answer he wanted to give was not the one Draco wanted to hear. But Nemo responded, not seeming to know when it would do him best to keep silent. "That wasn't the _plan!_ We were supposed to kill you, not only steal an eye!"

Raverat turned rapidly towards Nemo. Draco didn't. He thought such movement would only startle the idiot into keeping his mouth shut after all. "Really?" he asked, as if bored. "You'll excuse me if I don't believe you."

"No!" Nemo ducked his head and apparently attempted to rub his cheek against the chains. "You _have _to believe me. We meant to kill you. You've been a nuisance to us long enough, you and that partner of yours. The trap was meant to spring when you were together in the presence of someone who could be blamed."

_Now we're getting somewhere, _Draco thought, closing his eye. He didn't know if the pain or his own delusions had prompted Nemo to respond, and as long as it sounded like truth, he wasn't going to question it. "That's a trap that I'd thought beyond your abilities," he said, lacing cool contempt and grudging respect together in his voice. "You've surprised me, Nemo. Perhaps you'll surprise me again." He paused just long enough to let Nemo's hopes rise, and then finished, "But I don't think so."

"No!" This was a full-throated cry of agony, and Nemo was scrubbing his cheek so hard against his shoulder that it had started to bleed. "Really! I just tied the trap with the beast's name and nature, and the beast was the one who would sense when it was needed. Not me at all." He smiled pathetically at Draco. "I know I'm not the smartest. That means that you need to believe me, and stop them!"

Draco opened his mouth to ask what Nemo meant by "them," and then smiled thinly. Of course. Nemo still believed the itching arose from insects rather than a spell. He had probably worked with beasts so long that he preferred to attribute any magical effect to them rather than to reality. "I might," he said. "If you give me more."

Nemo froze for a moment. Then he jerked his head and began to babble. "Yes, yes, why not? You know the most important things already. The beast was supposed to kill you. The eye was an accident." His voice sank. "Not that _he _won't find some way to use it. You know that he will."

"Yes, perhaps he will," Draco said, and showed as much indifference as he could. "What is the name of this beast?"

Nemo said something that sounded like a kitten gagging on a mouthful of rotten porridge. Draco raised his eyebrow. "The _English _name?"

"I don't know if it has one," said Nemo. Again, for a moment, he looked calm and regal as he considered his area of expertise, though the image was undercut by the way that he tried to scratch his legs with his bound hands. "I would call it the Dark Argus, perhaps, because of the hundred eyes."

Draco nodded. The reference made sense, and that was as much as he expected from Nemo right now. "Is it sturdy? Can it be killed? What harms it?"

Nemo twisted towards him and stared with narrowed eyes. Draco felt Raverat touch his shoulder. He shrugged in irritation. The touch had come from his blind side, and Nemo was reacting so well that Draco had nearly started to forget the loss of his eye. He could have cursed Raverat for reminding him.

"You will not kill the Dark Argus," Nemo said in a thick, eerie voice, as if pronouncing a prophecy. "You cannot. You will not. You dare not."

_Shit. _Draco knew he should have trod more carefully, and that this particular danger was no one's fault but his own. He knew how protective of his beasts Nemo was. Of course a question about its vulnerabilities would lead him to rise above whatever pain he might be experiencing at the moment and fight for it.

But showing his knowledge of all that would be worse than stupid. So Draco stared, arms looped around his knees, and let his face reflect nothing but boredom and contempt. "Certainly I won't," he said. "It will probably die now that you're no longer at Nihil's side to feed it, anyway. I know that the beasts don't last long without someone to tell them what to do, and I don't think Nihil's as good at it as you are."

Nemo's face had a complicated expression on it, one formed of combined outrage and flattery. "You dare not," he whispered, and then shook his head. "But why am I concerned? You _cannot _kill the Dark Argus. It has no vulnerabilities."

"Including being fed the improper food and choking to death on it, the way Nihil will probably make it do?" Draco asked brightly.

"Its mouths are like steel," Nemo said. "Its stomachs are like steel. It perfectly obeys _him_. There is no way that you can kill it." He sounded now as if he was talking to himself, and his fingers flexed nervously in the air, no longer scratching. "It is the beast that was meant and summoned and made to last."

This was also getting somewhere, although Draco didn't know how many details he would be able to fetch out of that morass Nemo called his mind. He shrugged. "It can't have been that hard to summon, if someone else can control it."

"Do you know how long I spent collecting owl feathers and kneeling among the bones that I found in the south of Wiltshire?" Nemo demanded. "If you think that you could do it yourself, you are more than welcome to try."

_Wiltshire, again. _Draco had assumed, when he heard last year that Nihil had often appeared in Wiltshire, and when he battled him there, that it had something to do with the shade of his father that had taken up residence in the Manor. But this was more likely, that there had been some creature there Nemo needed to spend time digging up and researching.

Raverat shifted beside him, as if even the mention of necromancy was enough to make him want to hurt Nemo. It recalled Draco to himself. He thought Harry would come back to the tent soon, and he didn't want to remain here. He stood up. "Perhaps I'll summon a Dark Argus myself," he said. "Perhaps I'll kill it. Who knows?"

Nemo gave a number of outraged cries that blended with sounds of pain as the itching returned to his consciousness. Draco smiled and walked out without lifting the spells. He didn't want Nemo to realize that he'd told Draco anything important and connect it to the relief he'd been granted from the torture.

Raverat came behind him. He gave Draco several troubled glances, which Draco felt more than saw. Finally, Draco turned to him, rolled his eye, paused a moment to think about how pathetic that gesture would look with a single eye, and then demanded, "What is it?"

"You are colder than I thought you were," Raverat responded.

It was all he would say no matter how much Draco questioned him, so Draco gave up and returned to the tent.

Where Holder was waiting for them.


	26. Uncomfortable Allies

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Twenty-Six—Uncomfortable Allies_

"Allow me to see your eye, Trainee Malfoy."

Holder had started walking forwards when she saw him, stride so stately that it was a long moment before Draco thought to listen to the words she was speaking. Then he straightened his spine and took a step forwards. Raverat stirred at his side as if he would move up in support, too, but he said nothing. He would be content to remain a generic observer, Draco thought, even if Holder hurt him, because of what had happened between Draco and Nemo. Raverat was another one of those like Granger who thought torture unacceptable even when used against nonhuman enemies. It was no wonder that they got along so well.

"You can't see my eye, Auror Holder," Draco said, and was astonished at the coolness of his own voice. "It's gone now."

"I know that," Holder said, and her voice was actually something approaching gentle. Or at least respectful, Draco thought. It was hard to estimate how much respect there actually was in her expression, or how much compassion, because of the way that his missing eye distorted her face. She cocked her head to the side as if studying him from a different angle would give her a better idea of his injury. "I merely wanted to look at the damage."

"Why?" The words were cold and dry in Draco's throat. He stood motionless, not touching the empty socket the way he wanted to in the face of Holder's unemotional scan. "To get ideas of how to punish me and Harry in the future?"

Holder shook her head. "I would have destroyed you long ago if I thought that you were dangerous to our goals. Instead, I think we need you, but we have not handled you as well as we could have."

Draco blinked, startled by something approaching nearer to an apology than he'd thought he would ever get from Holder, and she let out a long, controlled breath. After a moment, Draco realized that the flutter of his eyelids had probably given her a better look at his bare socket than he was comfortable with. He straightened his spine and glared at her. Holder made a smoothing-down gesture, as of someone stroking a ruffled cat to peace, and carried on intently staring.

"Yes," she said at last. "A sacrifice. An unacceptable one." Her eyes shone with a cold delight that Draco didn't think he could have missed if he was blind, instead of only half-blind. "This will provide the spur Gawain needs."

_Of course I should have known that she was interested in me not because of what happened, but because of what use I could be to her, _Draco thought, but it was hard to blame her for that. After all, he hadn't expected compassion from her, and he would have tried to use an injury of hers in the same way.

"What kind of spur?" Draco asked. "To stop lying and treat trainees like normal human beings, instead of potential enemies?"

Holder serenely ignored his question. She examined him with wistful rapture instead, and then nodded and seemed to return to herself. "Do you know that you can grow it back?" she asked. "Or will you not try that, and take a magical eye instead?"

Draco shook his head impatiently. "I want to know what you mean by a spur," he said. "Then I'll answer your question."

Holder's face lost the traces of emotion it had gathered so far. Draco thought it probably would have been a struggle for her to keep them, really. She studied him, and studied Raverat, as though he would provide a key to the riddle. Draco preserved an impassive face. For all he knew, Harry might already have betrayed Raverat's part in the process when he had gone and babbled out his heart to Holder.

He and Harry would have to have a conversation about that, very soon.

Finally, Holder inclined her head and seemed to decide that she had lost this battle—or else that she would have to sacrifice something to get something, which Draco thought a much more likely conclusion for her to reach. "Gawain has been reluctant to carry the attack to Nihil. He has thought to wait and try to determine the extent of his power and his servants, to see if an attack is necessary or only attributable to a desire for revenge."

Draco snorted in spite of himself, because that was the most ridiculous thing he had heard in a long time. "Does he really think that Nihil is going to dry up and blow away in the wind without being opposed?"

"He does not," Holder said, though the way she bit off the words made Draco think they came closer to describing Robards's state of mind than she would like. "He merely wants to know whether you would rush impetuously into the middle of the attack on Nihil, when it comes, pleading the desire for revenge and the hatred that we know you feel, or whether you would be willing to wait and work with others who are more experienced."

"More experienced at what?" Draco kept his face as bland as possible, though he wanted to snap. And he didn't know if he succeeded, given the loss of his eye. _That will affect me forever. _Still, he felt more like himself than he had since the eye was taken. It felt _right _to have other people appealing to his authority and asking his opinion. "We're the ones who have fought Nihil the most. When you've directly engaged with him via the War Wizards, it doesn't seem that you've had much luck."

Holder's face cracked like an old wall. "We have not," she said. "And we want to use your experience. But you need to tell us what you want."

Draco paused and eyed her thoughtfully. He hadn't realized she might agree to a bargain, an old and time-honored way of doing things among the pure-bloods, or he would have tried proposing one. Come to think of it, he didn't know whether Holder was a pure-blood. The name was familiar, but she could have been a Muggleborn or a half-blood who just happened to share the name.

"I want acknowledgment," Draco said. "Support. You cannot use me as a spy anymore, or express such violent distrust towards me." He was considering rapidly in the back of his mind, meanwhile, whether Holder keeping this bargain would be enough that he shouldn't hurt her for hurting Harry. He thought he could put aside that pain if Holder offered enough to them out of this deal. He wondered if Harry would feel betrayed, and then threw the question ruthlessly into the back of his head. He could almost say that he didn't care if Harry did, given how he had reassured Draco over and over and _over _again that things would be all right if he would just allow Raverat into his head.

"Agreed," Holder said.

Her voice was under strain. Draco thought he could trust his ears if not his eye. She was starving for a solution to this problem, he thought. He could see beneath the façade of self-deprecation and cold obedience to her own standards that she had created for Harry. She wanted to compromise, had to compromise, because of what they had discovered, but she would never cease looking for a way to get her own back.

"I want someone to try and find out what happened to my eye," Draco continued. "If Nihil is using it as the center of a weapon, which he might, then it could become dangerous to all of us in the future."

Holder tilted her head again. "And what did happen to it, that you remember?"

"I don't know," Draco said, and lifted a hand so that he could trace his fingers down the still-unfamiliar scars. It was a pleasure to watch Holder flinch when he touched them. He wondered what else he could do that would make her upset. "The pain was so overwhelming in the moment it was taken that it might have been cast aside and lost, or taken into the void, or devoured."

Holder stood still for a moment, eyes wide and rapt, as if she was contemplating one of those visions. Draco wished he knew which one it was. Was she rejoicing in his pain, or shivering in disgust and thankfulness that it had happened to him and not her, or trying to think of a way in which Nihil could use an eye?

"Very well," she said, turning back to him and nodding. "Then I do agree that the time and expense of research is necessary."

"Who will you assign?" Draco asked. He could think of too many Aurors who would still try to treat him and Harry as children, even if Robards and Holder ordered them to do otherwise.

"I will tend to your request myself."

That was hardly ideal, but then, nothing about this situation was. Draco decided to leave that declaration, which was made in a tone of ice and steel, alone, and work on something else. "We also need to know _everything _that you've tried against Nihil which hasn't worked. Just because some of the information was in the book doesn't mean everything was."

"How well you know us." Holder's eyes were bright with amusement. "Yes, very well. We will get the War Wizards to share their records with us. They have kept more thorough account of the spells, which we have continued to classify by category rather than individual incantation."

Draco tried to think of something else he could demand. It was odd, he thought; his head had been filled with bitter responses to all sorts of questions only two days ago, and now he had a meager store of them.

"I don't want pity," he said at last. "If I see too many people staring at me with pity in their faces, I'll go mad."

Holder shook her head. "I have already met with your partner for this morning and started the rumor that you lost the eye in our service, doing something we asked you to do. That should win you some admiration. However, even if we spread around a general order that no one should regard you with pity, there would be some who did. If only because they would assume that an order like that hid some experience that made you especially eligible for pity," she added, almost under her breath.

Draco had to admit that she probably knew the temperament of the other trainees better than he did. Outside the comitatus, he really _didn't _know the other trainees. That would have to change if they became full Aurors.

_When they became full Aurors. _All this training, and the sacrifices that he had made for it, was a matter of pride for Draco now. Even if he decided that he couldn't bear to stay in a corrupt Ministry, he would keep fighting until he attained the coveted Auror badge, because he had come too far to let petty hindrances stand in his way.

"There will be those who ask you what you plan to do about your missing eye," Holder continued. "It would be best if you had an answer to them."

Draco grimaced. Oddly enough, he felt calmer talking to Holder about this than he would have felt talking to Harry, who had pressed him with some of the same questions. "I've considered a magical eye. But the one that Mad-Eye Moody had, for example, was ugly. I have no wish to be ugly."

Holder didn't laugh at the wish, to his surprise, though she gave him a harsh look that he wished he could have judged better. "Moody was ugly because he wished to be so," she replied. "Though it's true that no magic could have cured his eye and his leg injuries, he chose such crude replacements to intimidate his enemies. You do not necessarily have to follow his path. There are reasons to do so, but reasons that you should not, as well. Your lesser age might be a factor in making such a decision."

Draco frowned. He had assumed, without thinking about it, that of course Moody would have the best replacements available, because he was an Auror and the Ministry would require him to do so. But it made much more sense that the Ministry couldn't do anything against Moody's hard-headedness than that those were the uttermost limits of healing magic, Draco had to admit.

"I'll think about it," he said.

"Then that will be your answer to those inquiries?" Holder gave him an abstract look, as though she was judging his intelligence on how he planned to respond to rudeness.

Draco stood up straighter and gave her a flat look. "It will be," he said. "I don't understand why everyone in the camp needs to know what I'm doing about it as soon as possible."

"Leaders have a need to reassure others," Holder said. "Those who might panic because they know what Nihil can do across a distance to someone who was so far successful in fighting him would be calmer if they knew that you were not frightened of him."

"A sure answer could demonstrate rashness, as well as lack of fear," Draco said.

Holder gave him a faint smile. "And there you are too subtle for the average trainee, and even most of our Aurors. They will accept appearances at face value." She paused, and then added, "Pray do not fear that I am trying to make some sort of crude pun. Nothing could be further from my intentions."

Draco nodded thoughtfully. Up until this point, he hadn't thought of himself as a leader except in the comitatus and in the partnership that he and Harry had. Strange to think that he had wanted power and yet hadn't considered how he would look to the larger world. He should start thinking about it if he expected them to take him seriously.

"I'll tell them that it's a magical eye," he said. "Don't expect me to give them names for the product. I really will have to look around for a time before I decide on that, and their desire for reassurance won't push me faster."

"Understood," Holder said, and studied him a minute longer, as if she were fearful that she would forget what he looked like. Draco studied her back as coolly as he could when he didn't know what she saw in his scars and empty socket. Holder turned then and strode past him, close enough for her cloak to brush his, but in such a way that said he had just been dismissed from her mind.

Draco waited until she was gone before he turned to Raverat. "You haven't entirely convinced me that you aren't a traitor," he said.

"Who took you to Nemo?" Raverat's face was still pale, but a look of wonder had come into it, as well. Draco noticed the way his gaze kept darting after Holder. Perhaps he thought it remarkable that anyone would want to deal with Draco on an equal footing, Draco thought sourly. "Who suggested that you could get information from him? If I'm a traitor, then I would have freed Nemo by now."

"Unless Nihil told you to keep quiet for some reason, until he could free him without exciting such suspicion," Draco muttered. Things had changed. Harry's crazy gamble had paid off. Draco almost hated to admit that, since it meant he couldn't accuse Harry of betrayal any longer.

Then again, if he really was going to go out into the camp and join the other trainees instead of acting like a recluse in their tent the way he'd been half-planning, he would have to have Harry's companionship and trust, and trust him in return.

"I almost think that no proof I could offer you would be enough," Raverat said in exasperation.

Draco nodded at him. "Good guess."

Raverat paused, then shook his head. "Then why invite me to speak with you? Why debate with me over whether I am a traitor or not? If no proof would be enough for you, why should I care what you say?" By now his face was red, and Draco enjoyed the effect. He had managed to turn this seemingly unflappable teacher red and then white in the same day. He could see that much, could be sure about the color of someone's skin, even if he was unsure, at the best of times, where their gaze was directed or what they felt about him.

"Because you still have to work with Harry and Granger," Draco said. "They're part of my comitatus, and they've known me longer than you. If I tell them to follow me and ignore you, they will."

Raverat paused, then raked his hand through his hair. "Fine," he said. "You win. Not that I can tell what you want."

Draco ignored his tone and smiled serenely. "It really isn't all that difficult," he said. "First of all, I want you to swear a vow on your wand that you didn't try to set a trap for me, either by invading my mind or suggesting that I interrogate Nemo."

"A vow on my wand is serious," Raverat said, his face changing again, almost back to the serene expression that Draco had seen him wear at first.

"But not as serious as an Unbreakable Vow," Draco said, "which, believe me, I considered. And if you really have no evil intentions in mind for me, you should be able to make them without effort."

Raverat closed his eyes. "Clearly I can't expect you to understand," he said, in an exhausted voice. "But such vows might bind me in unexpected ways as I work further into the theory of esoteric magic, later in my life."

"They probably can't bind you more than the vows you've taken that make you a part of this Order of assassins, can they?" Draco asked in a friendly voice. "I didn't think so," he added, when Raverat opened his eyes and looked at him in startlement. "Now. Make the vow, in which case I'll think about trusting you again, or leave. But you should make a decision soon. Harry will be back in a few hours, I think." He squinted at the angle of sunlight on the wall of the tent and nodded.

Raverat gritted his teeth and drew his wand. He hesitated, then knelt at Draco's feet. Draco smiled. He had hoped that Raverat would take the more formal step of swearing the vow like this. It wasn't strictly necessary, but it made him feel happy and important, and he could use things that fit those descriptions right now.

"I feel ridiculous," Raverat said in a low voice.

"I know," Draco said. "But I'm only asking you to swear the truth, or at least two things that you say are the truth. It doesn't even suggest that you can't set traps for me or lie to me in the future. Only swear to the truth of the past events."

Raverat's nostrils flared delicately, and Draco thought he might stand and walk out of the tent for a minute. Then he pressed his teeth together with an audible grinding noise, sighed, and said, "I—I swear on my wand that I did not set a trap in your mind that I triggered when I touched it."

Draco nodded. "Good. Now the other."

Raverat's eyes flashed, but he said, "I swear on my wand that I did not suggest you interrogate Nemo because I serve Nihil and thought to trap you that way."

Draco waited for a moment, but Raverat's wand didn't catch fire, which would have been the usual order of events if he was lying. Draco sighed in what he told himself wasn't disappointment and reached out to push Raverat's wand back. "Fine. I believe you now. You can go," he added, hearing a crunch of footsteps outside the tent flap that told him Harry was probably coming back.

Raverat gave him a look that Draco thought combined puzzlement and loathing, and then stood up, swept him an ironic bow, and stormed out through the front of the tent. Draco chuckled. Harry, who was coming in, called after Raverat for a minute, then shrugged and came up to hug Draco. Draco embraced him back and tried to convey through the force of his arms how glad he was to see Harry. He knew that saying aloud that Raverat got on his nerves probably wouldn't win him any points.

"I'm glad to see you," he whispered at last, deciding words could help.

Harry pulled back and gave him a baffled smile. "And I'm glad to see you," he said, and then his eyes darted around the tent. "What? No burned spots or destroyed belongings since this morning?"

He was trying to joke, but Draco knew he wouldn't have been surprised to come back and find that. He leaned forwards, holding Harry's gaze, so that Harry would know he was serious when he said, "This is the best I can expect to be now that one of my eyes has been taken from me. I'm serious," he added, because he recognized, half-blindness or not, the doubt that made Harry's eyes a deep green.

Harry hesitated, nibbling his lip, then nodded. "I believe you. But explain why you feel so much better."

Draco told him about both the interrogation and his talk with Holder. Harry might not like torture much better than Granger or Raverat did, but at least he wasn't going to waste his time scolding Draco about it. He listened, instead, and nodded several times, laughing at the end when he heard about Holder's promises.

"You've got what you wanted," he said. "More power." He hesitated, then added quickly, "Not that I'm saying you should have had to sacrifice your eye to get it."

"I don't think of it that way," Draco assured him. "I know this wouldn't have happened if I was still whole, but I'll accept good consequences as well as bad ones for such a sacrifice, with pleasure."

Harry smiled in relief. Then he hesitated and added, "And have you forgiven me for inducing you to go to Raverat, and for going to Holder?"

Draco let his smile fade and the silence stretch between them. Harry fidgeted and glanced away, then glanced back. That bloody courage of his would never let him hide from anything long, Draco thought. He reckoned he should be glad that Harry sometimes paid attention to his admonitions about plunging in and risking his life recklessly at all.

"I have to remember that you did save my life," Draco said. His voice was more reluctant than he liked, but he owed Harry his honest feelings, as he had been trying to remind himself more than once in the last little while. "And I have to remember that you wouldn't have pushed me into these situations if you thought there was danger."

Harry shook his head, frowning. "I thought there might be danger with Holder," he said. "But I couldn't _stand _it, just lying there beside you and doing nothing while you mourned, and I thought it might win us some allies, or at least some ability to do something about your eye. And you weren't in a state of mind where I could talk it over with you."

"True," Draco acknowledged carefully. "I wasn't. But in the future, I would appreciate it if you never take such a step without consulting me."

"Fine," Harry said, with a grateful smile in Draco's direction. "I won't."

A missing eye didn't affect the way he saw Harry smile, Draco found, and nor did it affect the kiss on the cheek or the embrace that Harry gave him a moment later, or the way they moved towards the bed.


	27. The Virtues of Cooperation

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_Chapter Twenty-Seven—The Virtues of Cooperation_

"I am not yet reconciled to your impertinence."

Harry winced a bit. He didn't like Holder and thought her intimidating, but there was something worse about the stillness that Robards faced them with, even with his hands flat on his desk instead of pointing accusing fingers.

Draco, perhaps because he had been the one who made the alliance with Robards and Holder official, didn't seem as bothered. All he did, in fact, was give Robards one polite smile before he reached down to the packet of papers in his lap and chose the top one. His eye focused on it carefully before he passed it across the desk to Robards. Harry realized that he didn't know how well Draco could read since the loss of his eye.

_Something else to ask him, when we're alone and have more time, _he decided, and gave Robards a dubious glance when he saw how still he had grown. Did he distrust the document that Draco had handed him?

"This is a copy of our information," Robards whispered.

"I only wanted to remind you that we did see everything you recorded in your secret, _real _book," Draco said dryly. "We managed to get through the wards and take it without your noticing. We have skills that you need, and your she-wolf has made me bargains and promises. I wanted to ensure that you kept them."

Robards and Holder exchanged a series of mute glances. Harry wasn't sure what they said with those eyes. They had the companionability of people who had worked together for a long time, he thought, far longer than he and Draco had.

"Very well," Robards said, and whether it was an honest agreement or just an agreement with whatever Holder had communicated to him, Harry didn't know, but the words made Draco's shoulders relax. "How are we to defeat Nihil? Alice seemed to think you had some recommendations in that line, though, if you have, you have so far not employed them to great advantage."

Harry winced. Draco kept smiling, and even shook his head slightly as though reprimanding a favorite relative. "We have not had anyone but the six of us to trust and count upon," he murmured. Robards and Holder knew about the comitatus, but Harry didn't think they knew about the alliance with the Aurors led by Ketchum, and he was glad that Draco hadn't mentioned them. "With your money and influence behind us—and the other Aurors, if they agree to work with us—we can do a lot more."

Robards nodded as if he hated admitting that, and then turned to Harry. "Do you only sit tamely by and nod to every suggestion he makes?" he asked.

Harry blinked, caught off-guard by the attack. He felt Draco press his hand warningly against Harry's hip, but he shook it off. It wasn't as though he needed the reminder of how fragile their alliance was, or that he needed to be careful with his words. Draco and Robards had just proved that for themselves, pretty effectively.

"No," he said. "I do let him take the lead in situations like this, because he does it better than me. On the battlefield, I'm better."

Draco hissed at him. Harry ignored him again. Yes, Draco was the one who could come up with plans and strategies, and the one who had several times commanded the comitatus. Harry wouldn't argue with that. He _was _going to argue with the notion that Draco was the one who really led in dangerous situations, though. Harry's instincts would take him over and propel him forwards whether he wanted them to or not.

"Are you," Robards said, but it wasn't a question. He exchanged a glance with Holder again. This time, Harry had the distinct impression that she had shrugged to indicate that she didn't know whether he was speaking the truth or not. But that might only have been because both of her shoulders had moved at the same time. Robards nodded as if uninterested and then turned around and looked at Harry again. "Stand up and cast the most powerful spell that you know how to cast."

Harry smiled. He didn't think it was a nice smile, just based on the way that Holder narrowed her eyes and shifted as if she would put her body in front of Robards. Well, that was fair. He hadn't meant it to be nice. "If I do that, I'll destroy the tent, sir. The most powerful spells I know are based on our compatible magic and my blood necromancy." He saw no reason to suggest that it wasn't necromancy, which Portillo Lopez believed, until their alliance was more secure.

Holder leaned over and murmured urgently in Robards's ear. He listened to her without moving, just nodding and saying several times, "Are they?" or "How interesting," or other similarly uninformative phrases. Then he looked at Harry, cocked his head as if deliberating about something, and said, "Say I believe you. How are you going to prove that you aren't mere muscle?"

Harry felt Draco's leg pressing, cautioning, into his again. He shifted to the side to show Draco that he had felt it, and said, "Mere muscle couldn't have defeated Voldemort or kept me alive all the other times that Nihil tried to kill me." He was secretly delighted to see that Robards flinched at Voldemort's name and that Holder tightened her lips as though watching a sticky child, although neither of them said anything. "I have luck, sir. And instinct. It's hard to demonstrate because it doesn't tend to function outside emergency situations. But it's there."

"Luck," Robards said. "Is that what you call it, to bring your partner back without an eye?"

"Yes," Harry said, ignoring the hiss of breath from Draco. Really, he was doing better than Draco was at ignoring the insults, maybe because he had been expecting them. After all, the bargain that Draco had told him about Holder making didn't prevent insults. "He could have been dead."

"The eye is an unacceptable sacrifice," Holder said. In the silence dance between her and Robards, it was apparently her turn to speak again now. "But we do not truly know what kind of beast you faced in that darkness."

Harry shook his head. "Neither do we. But we know that it's called the Dark Argus, or at least that's a good approximation of a name, and that Nihil found its bones in—"

Draco's elbow hit him hard enough to make him release all the air he'd inhaled to talk, and as he bent over, wheezing, Draco said, "Do excuse my partner. He likes to gamble with our secrets. I prefer to trade."

Holder, for one moment, looked at both of them with a mouth full of laughter. Harry thought she might burst out with it, but she turned her head down and murmured, "Of course. But it seems that you know our secrets already, and we have a good idea of yours. I think the trade is unnecessary."

"It is not," Draco said. Harry could hear anger sparking under the surface of his voice, and he tried to apologize with a look. Draco wasn't looking back, though, so that didn't matter. "I want to know more about what you've done to try and track down Nihil. Were you planning a great trap? Were you deliberately holding back so that you could lull him into feeling off-guard? What plan did you want to try, to get rid of Nemo?"

Holder held out one hand and moved it back and forth. After a puzzled second, Harry figured out what she was doing: imitating a balance scale. "Those are heavy secrets," she said. "Tell us what you will give in return."

"I don't know how valuable they are," Draco said. "Perhaps I'll find out that I've traded Galleons for Knuts."

Holder smiled appreciation. Harry shook his head. They could sit here trading metaphors until Nihil conquered all of them, and he honestly wasn't sure if Holder and Draco would even notice. Robards might be a different kind of person, but he sat back and watched Holder as if he was content to let her bargain.

"Can I say something?" Harry asked.

He got irritated glances for his interruption, but he tried not to care and continued talking. "This is all fine, but we're supposed to be allies now. Don't we need to stop discussing the terms of the trade and actually talk to each other?"

"We are allies because of a bargain," Holder said. "We must keep to the terms of the bargain."

"Even if we lose the war because of it?" Harry was starting to think that he would never understand pure-bloods, no matter how long he lived with Draco.

"Even so." Holder firmed her mouth into a prim little smile.

Harry turned for help to Robards, which was not something he had thought he would be doing before he entered the tent. But someone had to stop this madness, and he thought Holder listened to Robards far better than she would listen to either of them. "Sir? Do you think the same thing? Do the Aurors mean less to you than the terms of this bargain?"

The Head Auror leaned back in his seat, and went on leaning back until Holder frowned and turned around to look at him. He met her eyes. Whatever she saw there made her shrink back, one hand grasping the edge of the desk as though it hurt but she couldn't let it go.

"I care about the Aurors," Robards said. His voice was deep and calm and quiet, and Harry had never heard it like that before. He thought Robards would have made converts of them a lot sooner if he had. "I care about them so much that I do not know if I can abandon them to the mistaken, misguided opinions of the people who would be their saviors whether they want saviors or not. On the other hand, if we do nothing, Nihil may overwhelm us." He made a swift, cutting gesture with one hand, and then stopped the hand and raised his eyebrows, glancing sideways at them as if inviting them to share a confidence. "You see the difficulty of my position."

Yes, Harry thought he saw it, and it impressed him in a way it hadn't before.

Robards leaned forwards, his hands clasped on his desk. "But trusting only to ourselves has done no good, either," he said meditatively. "You were able to get through the wards, and Nihil has come through, too, even if he has no spies in our camp." He looked at Draco for a second, specifically at his missing eye, but he was so good at keeping his expression calm that Harry couldn't tell what he really felt. "Doom is certain if we do nothing. So I feel it right to take a risk, and trust you. We will tell you everything we know." He raised an eyebrow. "Do you feel confident enough to do the same?"

Harry started to open his mouth to answer, but Draco cut in. "No."

Harry frowned at him. "Why _not_?" he demanded in a hissing whisper, which he didn't care if Robards and Holder heard. "It's not as though we can act effectively on our own now, when I've tipped our hand and when we have an idea of how much we're missing. We need to stop hiding and get official support."

"Because I don't trust them," Draco said, and he turned to face Harry, lifting his eyelid back from his empty socket. Harry winced. Somehow, seeing the connection of the socket to the scars across Draco's face was more hurtful to him than just seeing the eye gone. "And I think I've paid the highest price here. I should be able to dictate how the bargaining goes."

Harry looked at the floor and scolded himself silently. All these things seemed to happen because he hadn't been _thinking_. But he didn't know how catch himself not-thinking before the evil consequences happened, so he was quiet.

"You have the ability to dictate terms for your partner, perhaps," Robards said. He didn't sound as though he was moved by what Draco had said, but then again, looking at that bloody inflexible face, Harry didn't think he would necessarily be able to tell if the man was moved. "You do not have the ability to dictate terms for us, or for the world that will be destroyed if Nihil has his way."

Draco could glare more fiercely with one eye than he had with two, sometimes, Harry discovered. "I will have my power," Draco whispered. "I will have my dignity. Stand in my way, and you will find how hard I will fight to retain those."

Harry winced again. He didn't know if Draco had meant to speak that openly; a moment later, his cheeks flooded with color. But he didn't look at the floor. He looked at Robards, and then at Holder when she acted as though she might open her mouth and speak.

Robards bowed his head abruptly. Harry thought he was hiding laughter until he said, "I will honor your request. If you only tell me what you want. So far, I find your demands as vague as they are unaccountable."

* * *

Draco tried to hide his shock that he had got away with it. He had made the challenge out of desperation. He wasn't going to lose his power and his influence as soon as he had won them, simply because Harry was intent on giving all their secrets away and Holder would have been glad to see him fail. He had fought for this. He had won it. He was going to keep it.

And then Robards had folded, much more easily than Draco had thought he would.

It made him wonder if there was a trap in this, or, worse, pity. But no matter how he stared at Robards, no matter how many silent moments passed, Robards simply waited. Draco decided that the silence was making him look like he was the unreasonable and stupid one, and spoke harshly into it.

"I want you to promise that I won't be poked and prodded by people I don't approve of, looking for some way to grow my eye back. I want you to ensure that everyone will know our discoveries were _our _discoveries."

"It may be some time before we can announce who found them, simply because it may be some time before we can announce the discoveries themselves," Robards murmured.

Draco dismissed this. He knew an excuse when he heard one. "I want the comitatus to stay together and act as an independent unit, respected as one by you and the other Aurors who lead us. When you _can _publicize our work, then I insist that you do so. And I insist that you not penalize us in the Auror program after the war for what we might do during it."

"If you murder another Auror," Holder began.

Draco shot her a look that he hoped was rich with contempt. At least she didn't seem able to stand stares from his one eye as well as he thought she should be able to, so that might hold her back. "I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about using torture on Nihil's servants, since it's one of the few weapons we have, and possibly taking kills from Aurors, and defending ourselves against people who wish us harm."

Holder and Robards retreated into their silent communion again, a trading of glances and raised eyebrows and tilted heads that seemed pregnant with significance. Draco knew that Harry probably thought every little gesture had a meaning. Draco was convinced that half of it didn't and was simply intended to impress their new allies with how closely they had worked together in the past. It didn't impress Draco that much, given that they had already disagreed in front of him and Harry.

Then Robards turned back to him and nodded. "All right. And if you are thinking of demands like us allowing you to venture into the field, such consequences will naturally follow from treating your—comitatus—as an independent unit." The way his mouth twisted when he said "comitatus" made Draco wonder if he had a special reason to dislike that word, such as historical or personal motives. Draco promptly resolved to mention the word in front of him at every opportunity.

"Very well," Draco said. He actually didn't have any other demands to make. On the other hand, he didn't see why they needed the information about the Dark Argus now. He could keep that and trade it later, when he had seen that Robards and Holder were keeping their promises. He rose to his feet. "Do we have anything more to discuss?"

Holder looked as if she were chewing on a lemon, but also as if she understood the point he was trying to make. Robards looked as if he understood it and wanted to laugh. Draco nodded to both of them, since he found that he got no response to his question, and then turned magnificently away. Harry followed him obediently, looking back sometimes as though he thought Robards and Holder would stop him.

"I'm surprised we got away with that much," Harry mused as they strolled through the camp on the way back to their tents. Draco marked the way that people looked at him. There was pity on some faces, yes, but they turned away hastily when they saw his glare. And on others were more complex expressions that he couldn't read with the difference in his sight. But he didn't let them see that he was struggling. Another set of stares, more cool and less furious, made them turn away, too.

"It's less than they owe us," Draco said shortly. "If they had trusted us earlier and let us do as they should have, instead of treating us like enemies, then we might have settled the war with Nihil already." _Before this happened to me._ The words burned on the end of his tongue, but he didn't say them. He was trying to remember that Harry had some intelligence, too, though it ran in much different tracks from his own.

"We didn't trust them, either," Harry pointed out, in the reasonable tone that he used when he wanted to imitate Granger.

"We had reason not to trust them," Draco said "But you had saved the world once that they knew of. Without knowing all the reasons that they might have been able to trust us because we were fighting Nihil, they still chose to reject and attack us."

Harry frowned for a moment, then shook his head and lapsed into silence. Draco turned around to face him. They were close enough to their tent by now that he didn't think anyone would overhear, but he kept his voice to a low, controlled snap anyway. "Why? What's the matter? Did you think that they should be excused?"

"Not that," Harry said. "The way they've treated you is inexcusable. You're right about that. They could have solved some of their problems long ago by working with us, and they chose not to."

"You said _you_," Draco said. "Did you not think that you were included in that?"

Harry sighed, a long, complicated sound that seemed to travel up from his toes and ruffle his hair in its passing. "I don't know how to answer that."

"You seem contented to put yourself outside the circle that encloses me," Draco said. "Is this another form of sacrificing yourself so that someone else can benefit from it?"

"Maybe?" Harry offered a faint smile that Draco didn't return. Harry shook his head again. "I reckon that I was—I mean, I simply wanted to—I didn't _expect _treatment that was much different from the Head of the Aurors. Everyone except maybe McGonagall has either distrusted me or trusted me too much, the way Dumbledore did. They're suspicious that I didn't use my skills to get ahead, but luck, the way I told Robards today. It's hard to harness luck, hard to teach it to anyone else. So I reckon that it hurt me to see you doubted, because I know that you're more competent, but I can see why they might doubt me, because they have reason to think I wasn't driven along by competence."

Draco had to turn his face away.

"Draco?" Harry's voice was wary and alarmed. "Is something the matter?" He sighed again and came closer, though he halted before he took Draco into his arms. "Shite," Draco heard him mutter. "I always seem to fuck something up."

But in this case, it wasn't a fuck-up, and Draco couldn't let Harry go on thinking it was. He turned around and shook his head, keeping his voice as calm as he could. "It isn't that, Harry. I simply always forget how much you put me first and how much you bear without complaining about. I spend too much time thinking of you as stupid and rash and not much else. I needed reminders that you could have some virtues, too."

Harry looked torn between flushing in pleasure and flushing in anger, and in the end he settled for an embarrassed laugh and taking Draco into an embrace after all. "Thanks," he murmured into his hair. "Really, as long as my friends believe in me, then why do I need anyone else?"

Draco pinched the skin between his ribs. Harry yelped. "I hope that I'm more to you than just a friend," Draco breathed. He cocked his head back, hating that he couldn't seem to see the whole of Harry's face unless he held his head in just the right way. "I should be, after all we've shared."

Harry gave him a kiss that stole his breath and soothed some of the anxiety Harry's words had provoked. Then he actually got down on one knee in the mud, and Draco almost hoped that someone was looking, after all.

Harry looked up at him solemnly and took Draco's hands in his. A small breeze rippled his fringe and made him look ridiculous but also real. Draco thought he would have laughed. Instead, the laughter lodged in his throat.

"I wish I could have been all you needed," Harry whispered. "Stronger. Quicker. More generous and smarter. But I haven't been."

Draco pulled on his hands. "I just got through telling you that I don't appreciate you enough, and you do this?" he demanded. "I don't understand you."

"Shhh." Harry looked absorbed in the moment. Draco was unwillingly brought to feel the same thing, and had to blink back at him.

"I wish I could be that way," Harry whispered. "But since I can't be that way all the time, and since I'll make mistakes, I just want to remember this moment. I'll always remember it, that you think me worth appreciating even though I'm not perfect."

"You can be wonderful without being perfect," Draco whispered back.

"Sometimes I feel otherwise, with you," Harry said.

It was Draco's turn to flush. It was true that he'd had his lost eye on his mind in the past few days, but his thinking that Harry potentially had less intelligence than he did went much further back.

"Thank you," Harry said, and stood and kissed his cheek, not minding about the mud on the knees of his trousers.

They went inside the tent, where Draco could think of little else to offer but ordinary words or kisses. He chose the kisses, and Harry accepted eagerly.


	28. Moving Forwards

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Twenty-Eight—Moving Forwards_

"We have not been able to recover the eye."

Holder had told Draco that yesterday morning. Draco had nodded as if he had expected the news, and saved his silent staring at the wall for after she left.

He _should_ have expected it, he told himself. Even if the Aurors had more resources and time to devote to the research than Draco—which they certainly did—that didn't mean they would necessarily find one eye torn out by a magically conjured beast and lost somewhere in the vast void between the worlds. Or had the Dark Argus taken him into that void after all? Draco didn't know.

There was only one way that the news came as a relief. He could put aside any plans that centered on recovering his original eye, and start thinking about others.

Which was why he was standing in front of Portillo Lopez right now, while she examined his face and the scars on his cheeks, probing with gentle fingers that nevertheless made Draco wince. Then she lifted up the eyelid and probed into the socket, and Draco stepped back before he thought about it. The socket burned no more than the scars did, but there was something unexpectedly _intimate _about the invasion. He didn't want any member of Portillo Lopez's Order thinking they deserved intimacy from Draco.

"What are you doing?" he snarled. They stood outside the radius of the camp, beyond the tents, in one of the protected fields, and most of the Aurors and the trainees, except the comitatus, had stayed far from him since he rejoined the classes. Even the Aurors Draco knew were his allies didn't seem comfortable around him. He would have said, cuttingly, that losing an eye wasn't catching, but he knew they didn't really fear that. What they feared was more complex and ran deeper in them.

Portillo Lopez didn't fear him, though. She worked with a mostly unemotional coldness that Draco found more disturbing, in some ways, than the avoidance of the others.

"I tested the skin from the socket," she explained, picking up a vial of what looked like burned black flakes. Draco reckoned that was what was left of his skin after she had finished testing it. "It told me nothing distinctive. In fact, if you were to ask me, I would say that it was skin that had never been touched by magic."

"Skin that was dead," Draco finished with bleak pleasure. He should have suspected that, after what the Dark Argus had done to him.

Portillo Lopez frowned at him. "Dead skin and skin that has never been touched by magic are not the same. Muggles are not dead."

"Might as well be," Draco muttered and turned away, his arms wrapped closely around himself. He was not looking forwards to the tests that he thought Portillo Lopez would have to perform on him, at least if he was to get a magical eye. And he was feeling more out of sorts than normal, since it was much harder to read and write after the loss of his eye than he had thought it would be. He deserved a few days to feel sorry for himself.

"They're not," Portillo Lopez said, and there was steel in her voice. "I know the difference."

Draco paused and glanced over his shoulder at her. He reckoned she did, after all, know that. "All right," he said finally. "But what does that mean for my magical eye?"

"It limits your choices," Portillo Lopez said. Draco snorted. _Of course it did. Everything limits my choices nowadays. _"Most magical eyes come to rest on top of a magical injury. They connect with the latent power in the injury, as well as the magic in the body of the wizard they belong to, and work that way. Even if the magic is Dark, that doesn't prevent the eye from being of some benefit."

Draco thought that was the stupidest thing he had ever heard. Who _designed _magical replacements for missing body parts so that they would work because of the power left behind by cutting them off? "What you're saying is that I can't get a magical eye."

"I would have told you if I meant that," Portillo Lopez said, immune as ever to disapproval. "What _I _mean is that you'll have to get a different kind of magical eye. They are available, luckily for you."

Draco paused and considered that. It was actually pleasant to know that he still had a choice. Perhaps the limitation on the number of choices was even reassuring, although it didn't feel like that at the moment. There was no way that he could hesitate for a long time among a large number of magical eyes, while other people urged him to pick certain eyes because that would be most appealing to _them_.

"Tell me which kind I can have," he said.

Portillo Lopez nodded as if she had expected the demand and produced a small, thick book from beneath her robe. Draco leaned nearer and looked at it warily, but it wasn't some obscure tome on necromancy. It was what looked like a catalogue, and on the front had nothing but the black letters that spelled out: _Choice Selection._

Draco opened it to a page that Portillo Lopez had folded down. The magical eyes that glowed in the photographs, turning back and forth as though to show off their colors, were bright, intimidating, radiant. He saw golden ones, bronze ones, and those of a more natural color. He could have a grey eye, he saw at once, that would look like the one he still had left, and not shed any unnatural radiance. That would probably be best.

Then he paused when he found a picture of a bright silver eye. It didn't shine as brilliantly as some of the others in the pictures, but enough that no one looking at him would think it was the eye he'd been born with. Draco let his fingers rest next to it and thought. What did he want: a lack of stares, or the stares that would say the people looking understood the sacrifice he had made? With the scars across his face, there was no way that he could hide the loss of his eye for long, and he thought that the Auror trainees would probably make him notorious soon enough.

This might be a way to control his notoriety.

"This one," he told Portillo Lopez, after reading the text beneath the picture and making sure that the eye didn't require any unusual spells to maintain it or magical skin to function.

Portillo Lopez looked at the picture and then gave him an oblique look. Draco knew that much, although his eye was blinking and straining by now, trying to keep up with all the images thrown at it in the course of the day. "What?" he asked.

"That is—more striking—than I thought you would choose," Portillo Lopez said quietly. "I thought you would wish to pretend that your loss had not changed you."

Draco laughed, and stopped because it sounded too bitter. "That would be stupid of me," he said. "Given that I'm famous now in my own right, and also as Harry Potter's partner."

"In the first days after your loss," Portillo Lopez said, which Draco supposed wasn't the most annoying way to refer to it that she could have found, "you acted as though you wanted everyone to think that nothing had happened. Although you were also sensitive, you disdained pity. Have you given up on that now?"

Draco took a deep breath and reminded himself that he had no reason to lose his temper with Portillo Lopez if he had managed to keep it with Holder. "I can't control their pity," he said. "What I can do is force them to feel something else, with any luck."

"Such as wonder," Portillo Lopez said. "Or perhaps horror."

Draco smiled at her with his teeth alone. "Horror would be better than pity."

Portillo Lopez spent a moment more looking at him. Perhaps she was engaging in that weighting up of motives that she seemed to use so often with Harry, and that Draco had to admit that he found incomprehensible. Then she said, "I see. You will do well. And I shall order the eye at once."

Draco blinked, suddenly brought back to reality. "How am I going to have it—put in?" That was the best way of putting it that he could think of. "I can't go to St. Mungo's without leaving the training camp."

"My Order will do it."

Draco hardly thought _that _was the ideal solution, but he had time to think of an alternative, as Portillo Lopez didn't seem to think the eye would arrive quickly.

And his steps grew lighter as he went back to the tent, thinking about the ways that he could use a magical eye to command more prestige and attention than he had yet.

* * *

"Potter. I need to talk with you."

Harry paused and stared suspiciously over his shoulder at Herricks. Draco had continued not to attend the Partnership Trust class, because he said it would take him more time to adjust to doing exercises with Harry after losing his eye, and so it wasn't surprising that Herricks had decided to catch Harry after it. But Harry didn't know what he could possibly want.

Herricks gave him a small, tense smile when he saw the way Harry was studying him, and held up one hand. "I only want to talk with you, like I said."

Harry was a bit dubious about that, but on the other hand, he didn't see what Herricks could do when there were Aurors in every direction. He walked with him beyond the edge of the camp. Herricks led a winding path past the tents, as if he didn't want anyone to see where they were going.

Harry didn't worry about that. He had seen Hermione's eyes focus on them and narrow before they left, and she had flicked her wand in the little gesture that usually indicated a tracking spell. Assuming that Herricks had something stupid in mind, she would be able to find them easily.

They kept walking until they reached an area somewhat secluded from the rest of the camp by a tiny grove of scraggly trees. Herricks turned around and braced his feet. It was the stance Lowell and Weston had taught them to use when resisting attack. Harry mimicked him, wondering if Ventus was going to come out and attack him from the side, and if this was a test of some sort to show that Herricks should be the leader of the comitatus.

Then again, that couldn't be it, either, because Ventus followed Draco, looked up to him, and would never participate in a plot against him. Harry shook his head to clear it and decided to listen to what Herricks would actually say.

"You know as well as I do that Malfoy can't continue as our leader," Herricks said. He had picked up a long, slender stick and was stirring it through the grasses in front of him, parting the grass and then making it spring back into place as the stick continued along its way.

"Do I?" Harry asked. He made his voice mild, although it took an effort.

Herricks looked up, seemed to see what was in his expression, and threw the stick away with an abrupt gesture. "Of _course _you do, Potter," he said. His face when he flushed was distinctly unattractive, Harry thought, and he decided that he would remember that and tell Draco about it. Draco would appreciate the implied compliment. "He can't see what's coming from one side of him, which is going to make him useless in battle. We can defend him, so he can still come along on the missions and participate in the plans, but he can't fight with his old effectiveness. That means that we need another battle leader."

"Interesting that you should say that," Harry murmured sweetly, "when Draco is the one who negotiated more independence for the comitatus out of Robards."

Herricks flushed. "I don't care what he negotiated," he snapped, with plain untruth. "What _matters _is that he can't lead."

"And who would you suggest taking over?" Harry asked softly. "You know that Draco won't stand for it if Hermione or Ron tried to claim the position. I don't want it. Ventus won't take it. She knows her strengths and talents, and they don't lie in making plans for other people. She can't protect them, as she's admitted herself."

"All your objections are true," Herricks said. "You don't lack intelligence, when you want to use it. That only leaves me."

Harry spent a few minutes listening to the wind, and letting Herricks's words fall into the deafening silence they deserved.

"Why shouldn't I lead?" Herricks's voice was soft, but too fast, and there were bright splotches of red on his cheeks that looked like the flush of fever. "I have as much right as he does. I'm as smart as he is. The others will trust me—"

"Ventus might trust you, because she's your partner," Harry said. "And even then, her blind faith in Draco is going to be a problem. The rest of us won't. So that's your answer. It's not that you're being unfairly denied a privilege that you ought to hold. The problem is that we want to follow someone we know and depend on, and you're not that person."

"I could be, if you supported me."

Suddenly, it became obvious why Herricks had wanted to talk to Harry alone, instead of making his case directly to Draco or Hermione. Harry put his hands in his robe pockets and gave the other man a flat look. "You still have delusions about the power of my name, I see."

"You _should _have been the war leader," Herricks said scornfully. "I put up with Malfoy because I thought you supported him and would take a bolder stand if something ever happened to him. But here's that exact situation, and you're still holding back as if he has—as if has a _chain _on you. Don't you want to be free?"

"I don't value power," Harry said quietly. "He does, and he does a good enough job with it. I'm watching him, and so is Hermione, to make sure that he doesn't fuck up. If you want to do more than that, then you should have proved yourself, instead of just asking us to accept you because no one else wants the job."

"I think Hermione would take it in a heartbeat," said Herricks. "And you would, if you were being honest with yourself." Harry simply rolled his eyes, because he knew that Herricks's blustering was so much hot air, if Herricks didn't. "Why _won't _you be honest with yourself? The position is there."

"Not as much 'there' as you might think," Harry said. "Draco is going to get a magical eye. He'll lead us again, and in the meantime, he's counting on the comitatus to remain together, in part to look good to Robards and Holder. He won't look kindly on your trying to create a—change in the ranks." It was a much more polite word than the one he was thinking, but then again, he didn't want to create a change by forcing Herricks away, either.

"That will take time," Herricks said. "We need to be able to stand up and represent ourselves in the eyes of the other Aurors before then." He waited, but when Harry showed no sign of agreeing with him, he leaned forwards earnestly and said, "Malfoy cares too much about power."

"And you, of course, are agreeing to become a leader out of the goodness of your heart," Harry murmured.

Herricks, oddly enough, didn't get angry with him, the way Harry had thought he would. Instead, he leaned forwards some more, so that he was at the point where he was practically balancing on his toes, and whispered, "I want to do this job because someone needs to do it and I know that I can. I can fill a hole that I see in our defenses. I want to win the war with Nihil, and this is the best way. That's it. That's all."

Harry let the sound of those assurances die out. Then he rolled his eyes and said, "You want to do it at the worst possible time, when everyone is unsure about us. We haven't convinced Holder and Robards of anything important, you know. They still expect us to fuck up and wish that we would sod off. They're used to thinking of Draco as the leader of the comitatus now, and thinking that the comitatus supports him. If you insist on showing them that we have cracks in the façade, though, they could change their tune. We might be back as mere support for the Aurors again, left out of missions like children, if that."

"I only want to do what's right," Herricks said, and his expression was so earnest that Harry wanted to slap him.

"I'm sure," Harry muttered.

Herricks turned to the side and picked up a stone. Harry tensed automatically, but Herricks simply hurled the stone at the nearest hill, apparently to express his frustration. "Are you with me or not?" he asked.

"I'm not," Harry said. "I'm on the side of the person I think can lead the comitatus most effectively, and that's Draco."

Herricks gave him a pitying smile. "You know nothing," he said. "I know that Holder and Robards will feel plenty of enmity for Malfoy once they start thinking about him again."

Harry smiled faintly and looked up. "And why is that? Do you have any plans to encourage that animosity?"

That accusation actually did make Herricks freeze in place and blink as if, for once, Harry had come up with something that he didn't have an answer to. Then he shook his head and said, "Don't be ridiculous."

"I might well say that to you," Harry said. "You want to change things _now_? When everyone else in the comitatus is still settled on following Draco and any instability might make _us _look unstable?"

"I thought you would agree to do what was right," Herricks said, his eyes unreadable. "I should have realized that you were in Gryffindor House, and Gryffindors sometimes let personal loyalties blind them to the greater good."

Harry wasn't sure what it was about those words that broke his temper. Perhaps it was simply that he'd last heard them offered as a justification for Dumbledore's actions, which Harry was far from thinking good. Perhaps it was just that Herricks was being stuck-up and stupid and threatening someone Harry loved with a lot of stress and strife that he didn't need. In fact, that was probably the likeliest explanation. Harry was a Gryffindor and a slave to his personal loyalties, after all.

What really mattered was that suddenly he had his hands tucked into Herricks's robes, drawing them strongly shut around his throat, and Herricks was dangling from his hold and making desperate little _urk _sounds.

Harry didn't really remember moving or taking the grip. But now that he had it, he sure wasn't going to waste it.

"You arrogant little pissant," he whispered. "When you're alive because the rest of us trusted Draco. When Ventus is alive and the rest of the comitatus is around because we depended on each other when there was no one else. You think that you can come here, the last and latest of us, and change everything about our structure around to suit yourself? You have _no _idea. You never will."

Herricks's face was turning red. Harry deposited him on the ground again and shoved him contemptuously away. It was long moments before he started speaking again, but Harry honestly wasn't sure if that came from the choking or just from shock.

"Listen," he said at last, while Harry stared at him with his arms folded because it was simpler than choking him again would have been. "You had no right to do that to me."

"Is this the part of the spiel where you get into threats?" Harry opened his mouth in a rude, elaborate yawn. "I could see that working. Far better than the words that you've spoken and the proposals you've made so far, at least."

"If you're against anything breaking up the comitatus, why did you do this to me?" Herricks's face was still pink, but he seemed to have refocused on the real issue. Harry reckoned he had to applaud him for that, at least.

"Because you needed to see that I won't support you," Harry said. "And you were counting on my support, weren't you? There was no sense in making the proposal to me otherwise, when you know that I'm Draco's partner."

Herricks jerked his head down. "I might not need your support," he said.

Harry simply smiled at him and walked away. He didn't know if Herricks would have the same idea he did, but it was best to get back soon in case he did. Harry would warn Draco first, and then Ron and Hermione. Ventus might believe Herricks instead of him—though Harry doubted that, given her devotion to Draco—but his friends, and his lover, would believe Harry.

Then Herricks, who had tried to outflank Draco and isolate him from the safety of the others, would find himself isolated in turn.

Perhaps he shouldn't take as much pleasure in this as he was, right now. But Harry had meant what he said. He took threats to Draco seriously, and if he had to keep much of his attention, and enmity, for Nihil, that didn't mean that he couldn't spare some for someone as stupid as Herricks was acting.

Harry smiled, and walked faster.


	29. The Challenger

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Twenty-Nine—The Challenger_

"Malfoy."

Thanks to Harry's warning yesterday, Draco had expected the voice that rang out behind him. He was a bit surprised that Herricks had chosen to confront him in the middle of the camp, in front of the trainees going to morning classes and the Auror instructors coming out of their tents, but that didn't alter his plans about how to meet the challenge much.

"Herricks," he said, turning around and smiling as if he hadn't heard the hostile tone in the other man's voice. "Is something wrong?"

"You know that you can't lead the comitatus any longer." Herricks's voice was so rich with arrogance that Draco felt like applauding. His father would have appreciated someone like Herricks, he thought. "You only have one eye. How can you command us in battle? You can't even judge distances, never mind things like whether someone should cast curses or defend instead."

Draco felt like sneering—many people would say that the ability to command and strategize was unimpaired by the loss of an eye—but he didn't feel like showing Herricks that he considered _any _of his objections legitimate, never mind that particular one. He stood there in disdain until Herricks had come all the way up to him and was panting in front of him, face flushed. Draco sniffed delicately, but didn't smell the alcohol he had half-thought Herricks would use to bolster his strength.

By now, everyone had stopped and was watching them. Among the watchers was Ventus. Draco couldn't tell anything from her bright, interested face except that she was curious about the outcome of their little battle.

And he had an audience. _Good_. If he couldn't defend his strength in front of others, he would either be weak, or it would be easy for Herricks to come up with lies about him and spread them.

"Understand," Draco told him, "that you are the one who started this. I never questioned your fitness to be part of the comitatus, even after you approached me this way. Do you agree with that?"

Herricks snorted. His hand moved restlessly along his wand. Draco wondered if he would attack without warning, but he didn't think so. Herricks was protesting in the first place because he thought that Draco wasn't the right kind of leader. He had to prove that he was, and that meant following codes of honor. He had probably always planned on that, if he had chosen a public place.

"I know that no one else in the comitatus has the courage I do," Herricks said, "or you would have been challenged before now." He shot a betrayed glance at Harry, who, Draco could feel, had stopped behind his right shoulder. "Or they would have voted you out and put someone else in your place."

"It's strange that you think a duel is the right way to put me in my proper place," Draco murmured, "instead of a vote. One might think that you were afraid of the outcome if you gave them a chance to choose."

Herricks narrowed his eyes. He visibly restrained himself from responding, but he did dart his eyes from side to side, taking in Draco and then their audience. He said nothing. That didn't matter. Draco could practically read his thoughts by this point, despite the difficulty in reading his face with one eye. He wondered why Draco was raising the stakes by accusing him of cowardice, when he had to believe that Draco would lose the fight.

Draco, though, wanted everyone to see exactly what sort of arrogance Herricks possessed. He recognized it, because he had seen the same kind in Harry back in school. Herricks didn't think he could lose because he was doing the "right thing." Of course heroes never lost.

"Just remember that you could have avoided this," Herricks said, and lifted his wand.

Draco anticipated him by casting a protective shield around them, a circle that rose like a wall of silver flame. It blurred the sight of the watching audience, but it also meant that none of the spells used in the duel could cross the line and hit innocents. Herricks's face deepened in its flush.

"I would have done that," he muttered.

Draco smiled and said nothing. He wasn't a fool enough to let gestures that could make him look better and Herricks worse go unmade. Sure, Herricks had probably meant that first wand movement as a protective one and not an attack on Draco, but everyone would remember that it was Draco who had sheltered them.

A few Aurors had arrived outside the circle. Draco could hear the calls from people who sounded like Lowell and Weston, urging them to drop the shield and give in to the Aurors' authority. Draco ignored them. He couldn't turn his head to see them without taking his eye from Herricks, and he _had _to win this duel.

Luckily, he was fairly sure that he could do that, although he didn't know for sure how many defensive spells might be in the other man's repertoire.

"I never wanted it to come to this," Herricks said flatly as he began to circle. "Remember that, will you? That you could have given in and saved yourself this embarrassment with a gracious surrender? I would have treated you with grace. I know how hard it can be to give up power you believe you have a right to."

Draco regarded him with a fixed smile until Herricks shifted uneasily, and then shook his head. "No," Draco said thoughtfully. "I don't think you have any idea, because you've never done it."

Herricks's flexing face said that he felt the insult, and he launched a fireball spell with more force than necessary. Draco stepped coolly aside—he recognized the spell as one that only sent the fire in a straight line, without dodging or zigzagging involved—and watched the magic burn itself out on the protective shield.

"Can you do better than that?" he asked. "I'm starting to wonder how much of an addition you actually were to the comitatus."

Herricks snarled at him, and this time the combination of spells he cast was truly inventive: one a lightning spell, the other a spray of water that he'd timed so it would cross the first spell and soak Draco. Draco reckoned that Herricks thought merely shocking him to death with plain lightning too ordinary.

Draco would have had a hard time avoiding the lightning with both eyes. He didn't need to avoid the water, as long as it was only the spell that hit him. He focused on Herricks and said coolly, "_Tempora recessim._"

He briefly saw, and recognized, astonishment on Herricks's face before the spell took hold.

* * *

Harry prowled up and down outside the silver shield wall, staring at Draco anxiously. They had agreed long before Herricks made his challenge—last night, in fact—that Harry shouldn't interfere when Draco fought. It would make him seem weak, and the whole point of this was to show that he could be the leader of the comitatus despite Herricks's stupid doubts.

But it didn't mean that Harry was any happier with that barrier that made seeing inside the circle like looking through a curtain of water, and it didn't mean that he didn't fear for Draco.

Particularly when he noticed what spell Draco was using.

_Draco, for fuck's sake—_He had thought Draco was _joking _when he talked about this spell, and although Draco had showed him the incantation and the wand movement, Harry had automatically assumed it would only be useful against Nihil, or Nihil's forces. Against them, potentially very useful.

But now—

_Idiot!_

It didn't help that the spell was working exactly as Draco had said it would, and that few people were likely to recognize it, given its Dark nature and the shield barrier. That would have been one reason Draco had chosen that kind of shield, of course. And it would be impressive, and it would reassure the rest of the comitatus as well as the rest of the trainees that Draco was not to be trifled with. Most of the people around Harry were cheering in awe. They saw what had happened, not the process by which it had happened.

None of that helped because all of it missed the point. Harry didn't want Draco compelled to defend himself with Dark magic. There was still the chance that someone would notice. These were experienced Aurors, after all, at least in the audience.

The lightning bolt vanished as if it had never been, the light running backwards along the forks and the straight part of the bolt, aiming at Herricks. Herricks himself stared with his mouth open as his wand twitched in his hand, going through the motions that would cast the spell backwards. Meanwhile, the water splashed on Draco, and he stood still with immense dignity and let that happen. He shook his head afterwards and cast his first offensive spell of the battle.

"_Imaginor ovem!_"

Harry had to nod in grim approval. This was a better spell than one that reversed time in someone's immediate vicinity so that it seemed as if their actions right before that had never happened, and it would accomplish Draco's purpose, showing that he could fight an enemy and humiliating Herricks at the same time.

The spell hit. Herricks rocked on his feet as the white light shimmered around him like angels' wings—or at least what Harry thought angels' wings might look like, given some poetic imagination in the audience watching—and then vanished. Herricks's face was blank, and he uttered a hurt little sound. Harry felt more than heard some of the Aurors stir around them, ready to move forwards and stop Draco if necessary. They didn't know what spell this might be.

Harry snorted bitterly. _Too bad they couldn't have considered Draco's safety as closely when Herricks was trying to hit him with both lightning and water. _

But Herricks dropped to all fours and uttered the sound again. This time, there was no mistaking it as anything but what it was, a bleat. Then he pawed at the grass and lowered his head so that he was cropping at it with the flats of his teeth.

Laughter spread through the crowd as even those who didn't understand the Latin saw what Draco had done. Herricks thought he was a sheep. He capered forwards like a lamb, then paused and stared around in perplexity, apparently looking for the rest of the flock. His gaze on Draco was questioning. He bleated again and trotted in a circle, swallowing a few blades of grass with every evidence of enjoyment.

Draco watched him with a tolerant but contemptuous smile. Harry kept an eye on Lowell and Weston, the Aurors nearest the barricade. Weston had a sharp smile on her face. Lowell looked less approving, but both of them were nodding. Harry thought they hadn't believed that Draco could cast a spell in a duel without hurting someone. Well, they'd had their chance to see better.

Draco circled his wand in a quick ring and hissed the particular counterspell to this charm under his breath; Harry suspected that Draco didn't want the majority of those watching to learn it. Herricks paused, his nose quivering, when it hit, and then turned bright red and sprang to his feet.

"I've humbled you," Draco said, his face blank and his voice so bored that it would take keen ears—keener ones than Herricks had, Harry believed—to catch the menace in it. "That's good. A good leader should always have some measure of humility. Are you willing to agree yet that you can't lead the comitatus, or do I have to teach you another lesson?"

Herricks quivered. Harry could see the different sides of the conflict fighting in him. On the one hand, he really did want the good of the comitatus, and his objections that Draco couldn't handle himself in battle should have been answered, on both the offensive and defensive fronts.

On the other hand, he didn't want people to laugh at him, although they would anyway after he had acted like a sheep, and his pride had to be as strong as the desire to do well by the comitatus, or he would have left Draco alone.

Harry saw the moment when Herricks lost the battle to his pride. He swirled his wand in a spiral shape and cast his hex nonverbally. The air between him and Draco turned the color of a shaken sheet.

Harry didn't know what spell was coming any more than the majority of the stirring, muttering crowd did. He could only clench his fists together and hope that Draco did.

* * *

_Ah, yes. I thought he might choose that one._

Draco hadn't dueled someone before whom he understood as well as he understood Herricks. He had fought beside the man, listened to his private thoughts in the discussions of the comitatus, and watched him argue with Ventus, whose ideas Draco also understood well. So, while he'd never dueled him, he still had some understanding of how he would react in a battle situation, which was more than he had with Nihil or his minions.

So he knew that Herricks would go for something big and flashy, to prove that his previous loss to Draco had been a fluke, and something humiliating, because he had to address the penance that Draco had inflicted on him. That left a limited choice of spells at his disposal, at least given that he was still an Auror trainee and he wouldn't use Dark magic. Draco had his defenses ready and waiting under his tongue while he watched Herricks, using the perception of how Herricks shifted to the side and tossed his head more than he used his eye to estimate the idiot's mood.

And now Herricks was going for a spell that would render Draco naked and bound, hanging from a wooden cross-bar that seemed to have been arranged for someone else's pleasure. It was one of the more imaginative options, and Draco had to allow that he was rather cautiously impressed. That didn't mean that he was caught defenseless, the way Herricks had intended, and that didn't mean that he was tempted to lose to soothe Herricks's ego. Nothing would soothe Herricks's ego except a comprehensive scratching—something Draco was also disinclined to provide.

So he caught the hex flying towards him with one of his own. It didn't reverse the time between him and Herricks; it simply created multiple illusions of himself, so that the hex had to spread between them and expend its force in minor inconveniences like the brief feeling of no cloth against his skin. It couldn't actually do Draco any harm, and in the meantime, he would remain the favor.

He knew what the others outside the shield would be seeing: many Draco Malfoys appearing, fluttering and flashing, and then vanishing again. In the meantime, Herricks flew backwards and was surrounded by a cloud of white sparks and muted flames. When they disappeared, he had suffered the fate he intended for Draco.

Another gale of laughter arose. Draco coolly studied his handiwork and walked closer. His eye couldn't give him the proper view from so far away.

Herricks, his naked chest crossed by ropes that carefully avoided his nipples, stared at Draco with hatred. That was a more extreme response than Draco had thought he would provoke, relying as he was on Harry's report that Herricks still really wanted to be part of the comitatus, but as its leader. Now it seemed as if he would give up much, including the comitatus, to destroy Draco. Draco arched an eyebrow and spoke quietly, watching the twitching muscles in Herricks's face as much as he could. If he made a mistake now, he might set up an enemy at his back.

"Listen. I wanted to give you the chance to back away. You decided not to take it. You know better than I do what that means, now that they've—seen you. You could lose Ventus's friendship and membership in the comitatus. Do you want that? Or will you continue to pursue vengeance, vengeance that you can never take?" Draco was tempted to add that Herricks should have learned by now that Draco was simply his superior with a wand, but refrained. He would leave that up to their audience to judge.

Herricks's hands flexed back and forth in the loose loops of rope that tied them to the wood. "I hate you," he said.

"Yes, yes, expected and very tiresome." Draco flapped a hand, not allowing mockery to enter his tone. He could do this if he kept his voice calm and made it clear that he was judging Herricks as a potential member of the comitatus, not someone he scorned. "We only included you in the first place because you were Ursula's partner. I'm starting to think we should have had higher standards."

For the first time, a flush of true shame, rather than the false kind provoked by Draco's exposure of him, crossed Herricks's face, and he looked away. "I had the right to think that the loss of your eye had slowed you down," he muttered. "Someone who's not physically able will never be as good as someone who is."

"Do you know who the Auror with the most captures in the last twenty years is?" Draco asked.

Herricks's flush deepened, but he didn't reply. Draco answered for him. "Mad-Eye Moody. Now, I have no intention to _look_ like he did, with that ugly, scarred wooden leg and roving eye, but I wouldn't mind rivaling his record."

"You're not him," Herricks said. "You didn't get through training before losing your eye. That makes a difference."

"It only means that I'll have longer to adapt to the loss before I go chasing criminals," Draco said easily. "And to leading the comitatus, and to fighting in the war against Nihil. This war is a proving ground harder than any dueling circle or ordinary program. Will you accept that or not?"

Herricks closed his eyes. "If you would get me off this bar, then it would be easier to think," he muttered.

"So sorry for that," Draco said, with a smile that he knew didn't make him look particularly sorry. On the other hand, Herricks wasn't looking at him right now, so it wasn't as if he would know. "You'll have to think like this. I'm not fool enough to release someone who would immediately try to attack me again."

"You think so little of my honor?" Herricks opened his eyes, but kept his head turned away, as much as he could given the ropes.

"Yes," Draco said simply, and then waited. Herricks would either give in or not, and Draco had to admit, he could see possibilities for himself and the comitatus in either one. He was curious as to what would happen, not apprehensive.

"It should have been Potter," Herricks muttered. "You can at least agree with me, that it should have been him? He's the one who won the war. He's the one who has the name, and the fame, and the power, to draw other people to him."

"With everything you've learned about Harry in the last few months, you can still say that?" Draco rolled his eyes. "Really? He never wanted the fame and the attention. He still worries that his reputation will affect the way the Aurors treat him, either positively or negatively. He would find either embarrassing. And he's right, at least about Holder and Robards. They expected miracles from him and that he would try to take over the Aurors at the same time, because people would follow him. But he doesn't have those desires. And his power is unpredictable. It's linked with Nihil's. He doesn't make the best leader for other reasons, too, but that's a large one."

Herricks bit his lip, hard, as though he assumed that it would somehow lead him to more intense thinking. He bit it until blood flowed, and Draco waited, unimpressed and unshaken. No one could interfere, given the silver shield, and given that, if the Aurors were really interested in preventing a duel and nothing else, they would have done so before now.

"He could still increase the size of the comitatus and serve as a liaison between us and the outside world," Herricks muttered. "And I don't think that you understand what his great attraction to me is." Draco narrowed his eye, but Herricks went on and clarified that he hadn't meant to say Harry was sexually attracted to him. "He doesn't want power. You do. That means he's a good leader and you're not."

Draco, when he recovered from the shock of that, had to laugh. Herricks shot a glance towards him at that.

"You've been listening to too much old moral philosophy instead of the realities of leadership," Draco said, shaking his head. "Yes, the people who are reluctant to lead might be the best in some people's eyes because they would give up power quickly and not stray too far from the rules. But would they have the _talent _or the _willingness _to lead, if all they're thinking of is shedding their responsibilities as soon as possible? Why should I trust their work ethic to make them stay in the position, when their will and their natural bent are against it? Someone who wants power makes the better leader, because it means that he'll want to stay in power and so listen to his subordinates more."

A frown spread across Herricks's face. "Someone who desires power might not have the natural talents, either," he muttered.

"I think we can both agree that that's not the case here." Draco spun his wand, not taking his gaze from Herricks. "Can we count on you or not? This will have to be the last rebellion, if you're going to say that we can. The comitatus can't afford to worry that you'll shoot some curse at our backs if you aren't sincere. I _will _put you out if you can't make a true submission."

Herricks closed his eyes, but Draco was more hopeful this time. Herricks had a more thoughtful cast to his mouth. When he looked at Draco again, it was to nod.

"Yes, I see what you mean," he said softly. "There's no room for me otherwise, so I accept. I swear that I'll live by your rules and serve side by side with Potter without suggesting more to him."

Draco hid his laughter—as if an offer from someone like Herricks would tempt Harry and cause him to abandon his principles!—and nodded. "Very well. I'll give you a trial period, and we'll see how you do." He waved his wand to release Herricks from his bonds and restore his clothes to him.

When he lowered the shield, Harry immediately came up and kissed him. Draco accepted it with one eye on Lowell and Weston, the closest Aurors.

But Weston was smiling, and Lowell, if less pleased, as he looked, was willing to abide by his partner's rules. She said, "I see that you've learned to handle yourself, Trainee Malfoy, in more ways than one."

Draco nodded and leaned back into Harry's embrace. Even this could be useful, he thought, seeing the eyes of the crowd fixed on him still. Let them all see that he was the beloved and the partner, in more than one sense, of the Savior of the Wizarding World.

Let them try to go against him then.


	30. Gifts and Surprises

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Thirty—Gifts and Surprises_

"We are still learning from our researches."

Draco sighed. He knew, from the stiff way Holder spoke and the direction in which she turned her head, so as to avoid his gaze, that the words were simply a cover for the lack of success or knowledge or _new _information that the Aurors were finding. Draco had to appreciate that it wasn't easy to research death, but that didn't mean that they shouldn't go further and try harder.

He leaned forwards, angling his head so that Holder would have to take notice of his single eye. He wasn't above playing up the "unacceptable sacrifice" that had put Holder on his side in the first place. If she was guilty, then she might hurry up and start putting together the basics of a plan to defeat Nihil. "Fine. Is Robards still behind you? Will he support a direct attack on Nihil?"

Holder made a small gesture with one hand. "He will. I know that you question his commitment, Trainee Malfoy, but he is simply cautious. He doesn't want us to overcommit ourselves to one course of action too soon."

"Move too slowly, and we'll find Nihil overcoming us," Draco muttered, leaning back in his chair. He was sitting in the entrance of Holder's tent, while the breeze blew on his face from his blind side. It was soothing, and eased the odd, burning ache that Draco would feel in his empty socket and his scars at random moments. "Just remember that."

"I am." Holder turned and glared at him. "And before you can say it, yes, I also realize that we might not be able to rely on your partner to save us this time, if his magic is part of the same continuum with Nihil's. That would require—"

She went still. Draco narrowed his eye as he watched her rise to her feet. She was extending one hand in front of her as though to grope around an invisible wall that had suddenly appeared in her way. Her expression was stricken. Draco couldn't tell whether she was feeling fear or excitement from it.

"Auror?" Draco asked, making sure his voice was edged.

"It might," Holder said, and didn't complete the sentence, instead whirling around and sprinting out of the tent. Draco started to rise to his feet and follow her. He didn't generally move as fast since the loss of his eye. He didn't want to trip over his own feet and be an object of more embarrassment and staring than he already was.

"Malfoy."

With a sigh, Draco turned around. He had taken on more responsibilities since he confirmed his position as head of the comitatus, and it seemed that all sorts of people came to talk about different problems and suggestions, to the point that he didn't automatically recognize all the voices that addressed themselves to him anymore.

His heartbeat quickened when he saw Portillo Lopez standing behind him, however. She cradled a red lacquered box in her hands. Draco bit his lip and tried to look as if he wasn't sweating, though of course Portillo Lopez would be swift to spot it if he was.

A silvery glow came from the box.

"My eye is here?" he whispered.

Portillo Lopez, whose gaze often seemed fixed in the distance as if scanning the mysteries of the dead rather than the living, was looking directly at him now. She nodded and reached out to put a cold, strong hand on his arm.

"And my Order is here to restore you."

* * *

Harry had thought he knew what anxiety was when he was watching Draco in the middle of the circle of silver fire, dueling Herricks. He hadn't had any idea. _This _was anxiety, to stand silent and sweating beside Draco's bed while a circle of Portillo Lopez's Order surrounded them, draped in heavy dark robes that hid their faces. Ron and Hermione were somewhere outside the tent, with Herricks and Ventus, but Harry found it hard to think about them.

Or, really, to think about anyone except the man who lay on the bed, his arms stretched out rigidly at his sides, his head tilted back and the empty eyelid propped up with a spell that let Harry see straight into the socket.

Portillo Lopez had warned Harry that he couldn't interfere, no matter how much it might look like Draco was in pain. Of course he would be, Portillo Lopez had said; the body didn't easily accept the transfer of a new magical object into itself at the best of times, and this was a new _eye _connecting with dead skin. But they knew how to restore Draco. Harry would have to remain silent and stay out of it if he trusted them.

Harry wasn't entirely sure that he did trust these men and women, at the moment. They looked too much like Death Eaters.

But Draco had said that he wanted the eye back, and God knew what they could do if the Order didn't help. Harry wouldn't trust himself with something like a magical eye, and they couldn't betray secrecy and the war by going to St. Mungo's—who might not even have specialists who could do something like this, for all Harry knew. So he stood there, silent, and heard the chanting rise and fall all around him. If any of the Order were using their wands, he couldn't see it, since the heavy sleeves of the robes concealed their arms and hands. The only thing he could be sure of, the only thing that seemed real in the universe besides Draco, was their voices, rising and falling.

Draco lay still. It was more than Harry thought he could have done in the same circumstances as Portillo Lopez opened the red box at the foot of the bed and dipped her hand inside. Harry half-wanted to look around and see what the eye looked like when she brought it out, but he couldn't turn away from Draco's clenched jaw and locked muscles.

Besides, he could see well enough when Portillo Lopez stepped around the bed and extended her cupped palms to Draco.

The eye shone like a crystal ball in Treleawney's rooms back at Hogwarts, although it also pulsed in a faintly disturbing way that Harry reckoned was meant to show it was alive. Portillo Lopez murmured words that could have been instructions or soothing words for Draco or even commands to the eye. Then she knelt down beside the bed and delicately let her fingers explore the sides of the eyesocket and the scars.

That must have hurt, too. But Draco lay still.

Harry moved nearer, hoping that Draco would sense him there, somehow, despite Portillo Lopez's injunctions that they mustn't touch.

Portillo Lopez urged the eye down. For a moment, it pulsed brighter than ever, and Harry was afraid that it was too big for Draco's empty socket. What would they do then? They could send for another one, he supposed, but it would damage Draco's hopes, and it would dismay the rest of the comitatus. Harry saw how they relied on Draco now, although they might deny it.

Portillo Lopez pursed her lips and gave a shrill whistle.

The chanting all around Harry soared to a pitch high enough to shatter glass, and froze there. Harry had to clap his hands over his ears, but at least he never blinked or looked away from the bed.

The eye turned misty and transparent. Then it seemed to ooze, or melt, from Portillo Lopez's fingers into Draco's socket. Harry took several deep breaths, because that was one of the more disgusting things he had ever seen, and then Portillo Lopez flattened her fingers out and spread them apart.

The eye was no longer in the middle of them.

She stepped away from the bed, and the members of her Order nodded approvingly and sang and stamped and began to move in a distinct, dancing circle. Harry huddled a little closer to the bed so that he could escape the dance, staring at Draco's face.

The eye settled into place, for a moment still a magical extension separate from his body. Then it glowed, blinked, and focused.

Draco turned to look at him.

Portillo Lopez settled back with a loud gasp, staggering as though she would fall. Luckily, one of the Order dancers caught her and set her back on her feet; Harry was incapable of leaning over and helping her at the moment. "Thank Merlin that's over," Harry heard her mutter, sounding more human than she did most of the time.

Draco extended a hand. Harry clasped it. "How do you feel?" he whispered, hardly able to believe that it wasn't horrible. But Draco was _seeing_ with the eye, and that was the important thing.

* * *

Draco could understand what Portillo Lopez had meant when she warned him that the eye might be awkward at first.

His head, and the skin of his face, seemed to bulge and stretch around the eye. The world turned in two different directions at first, as his body sought to integrate the eye had that got used to seeing on its own and this new, magical one. Draco could feel random pulses of energy traveling through his body from his face. He reached up, half-wondering if he would pluck it out and fling it from him.

Then the pulses solidified, and thickened, and extended into his body like a cable. Draco could _feel _the eye anchoring itself into place. The gelatinous images he had half-seen became real, and then crossed over with the views from the real eye, and blended, and steadied. Draco changed his reaching hand into a sunshade that would protect him, or should, from the sudden _reality _that stretched all around him.

It wasn't perfect. Seeing through a magical eye wasn't like seeing through one of flesh and blood, and couldn't be, even though Draco had chosen one that was without the more exotic magical properties of Moody's. But the images around him had a soft silvery glow, and he could live with that. And they were sharper on one side than the other, but he could live with that, too. It seemed that his real eye had the ability to see further with peripheral vision, but his magical one gave him better vision straight ahead.

Draco could live with that, too. The most important thing was that so much of what had been darkness was now light.

He looked up at Harry, and found that he was no longer peering at two separate images of his face, stamped on darkness with nothing behind them. He was seeing Harry's face, and he could make out all the little nuances that flickered through his expression, the tightening of the skin around his eyes and his anxious look. Harry had his hand and was whispering, "How do you feel?" over and over, in a way that meant it wasn't the first time he had said it.

Draco nodded twice, then stopped himself before he began to look like a ridiculous Muggle toy. "Better than I would have thought," he said.

"Can you—can you _see_?" Harry spoke the word with a hushed reverence that would have made Draco laugh, but he understood. Harry was trying to ask how he felt in a different way. Draco let his hand tighten on Harry's by way of answer.

"Let me up," he said. "I want to see what happens when I look around the room, and then I want to see how I look in a mirror."

Harry nodded and hauled him up. Draco wondered if he was aware of the strength of his muscles when he did that, if he knew how strong he was altogether, or if he knew how his magic shone around him—

His _magic_.

Staring, Draco realized that he could, indeed, see Harry's magic. It glowed and rose and fell around him in sparkling cascades, silver and green shot through with red and black on the edges. It was one of the most fascinating things Draco had ever seen, if not always the most beautiful; the black and red made it look like a volcanic eruption sometimes. But he could see more with his new eye than his first one had allowed him.

It was a gift. Draco firmly told himself to believe that, rather than seeing it as just another level of his strangeness.

"Are you all right?" Harry was squinting at him, as if he knew that Draco had gone quiet and still for a reason and not simply because the world was strange around him.

"Yes, of course." Draco kept his voice as calm as he could. The members of Portillo Lopez's Order had left, but Portillo Lopez was watching them, and he didn't want to sound too excited or upset in front of her. Only God knew what she would decide to do if he did. "I can see magic, that's all."

"Everyone's magic, or just mine?" Harry asked.

Draco blinked. He hadn't expected Harry to ask a question so intelligent—

_And I do need to stop underestimating him like that._

Draco turned his head away and fixed his attention on Portillo Lopez. She stood up, as though she knew what Draco was seeking to understand about her and wanted to help him by showing off as much of her height as possible.

The magic around her was a different sort than the kind that encompassed Harry. In fact, Draco could only see three rings, like the rings of a planet, each a deeper gold than the next. Portillo Lopez might have been walking around the world in a costume made of brass. The rings hummed quietly, and Draco wondered if it was a measure of how much under control her magic was, or if it was touched by necromancy and her struggles to murder necromancers and _that _made the difference. Would Harry's magic look more like that as he grew older and learned to tame his power?

_If any of us survive to grow older, and Nihil doesn't destroy the world the way that he's been threatening to do._

But Draco couldn't think about that right now. He nodded in response to Portillo Lopez's curious gaze. "Yes, I can see you," he said. And although he could only see the magic through his new eye, he no longer felt as disoriented as that revelation had made him expect to feel. His head, or his magic, or both, were working hard to blend the impressions from both sides of his brain. He relaxed and leaned on Harry, letting Harry escort him across the tent so that he could see the mirror waiting on the other side of it.

The mirror was large and made of silver, unflattering but real. Draco blinked, and saw both eyelids slide shut over both eyes, exactly as if the silver one had always been there. It shone, but not as radiantly as it had when he watched Portillo Lopez bring it out of the box. Draco shuddered privately. The memory of her holding the eye towards his face, while it dripped through her fingers like ice cream, would stay with him as a private image of torture for a long time.

But now…

Draco reached out and touched the mirror with one hand. Yes, it was where he thought it should be. No more problem judging distances and angles. Draco would have expected more, but then again, this was a _magical _eye. It had already bonded itself, or it should have, with his internal power and begun to adjust itself to the needs and the differences of his body and his expectations. Draco smiled, and the reflection in the mirror smiled back.

"I can't wait for the others to see you," Harry said. His expression was bright and wistful, and he leaned on Draco's shoulder with a smile that Draco reached a hand up in turn to trace, relying on his reflection for guidance. It worked; his hand landed where it should be instead of hovering in the air off to the side, and Harry made it easier by leaning forwards and kissing his fingertips. "Can I bring them in?"

"With a warning to Herricks first," Draco said, nodding majestically. "I'm only the poor patient who might be wounded by an insult otherwise."

Harry raised an eyebrow at him and stepped back to the flap of the tent. Draco went on studying himself in the mirror. The glass wasn't enchanted, and that accounted for why he saw no banners of magic rippling from it, but when he held up his wand, he couldn't see anything there, either.

Then he wondered: why couldn't he see his _own _magic?

It didn't work in the mirror, apparently, but when he looked down, he saw sparkling bands of deep blue and green that encircled his wrists like bangles. Draco held them up to his face, closer to the magical eye than the other. They hummed like Portillo Lopez's—no, they sang, and he liked their restrained, pleasant music.

"You have made the right choice."

Draco blinked and looked up. Portillo Lopez stood not far from him, studying him with critical detachment. Draco realized that he hadn't heard her move. He had got used to not paying as much attention to his surroundings under the influence of losing one eye. That was a mistake that he would have to correct as soon as possible. His comment to Harry notwithstanding, he didn't want anyone thinking of him as helpless, even while he was still adjusting to the magical eye, or easily tricked.

"Did you worry that I wouldn't?" he asked, and examined himself. The scars really did detract from his appearance, he had to admit. They would be the first things to go.

"Yes," Portillo Lopez said. "I thought that you might decide it was better, for your pride and your image, to have no eye than a magical one. That would have satisfied you in some ways, but led to a poorer outcome for the battle and the war."

Draco chuckled. He couldn't remember hearing her speak like that before. "Do you think that I'm that important to the defeat of Nihil, then?"

Portillo Lopez gave him a strange blance. "Of course."

"In and of myself?" Draco had to press. He didn't know what was taking Harry so long to come back with the rest of the comitatus, but he would take advantage of it to question Portillo Lopez. "Not simply as Harry's—balance, and partner?"

She shook her head and gave him a single, slight, puzzled look. "Why would you assume that anyone valued you only for that? Most of those who despise you also despise Potter, and would see no reason to keep either of you about."

Draco shut his mouth as Ventus and Granger came into the tent, Weasley and Herricks approaching more slowly, but he couldn't help but think there was a flaw in her reasoning. Someone like Holder could want to use Harry and see Draco as an obstacle, someone who had to be eliminated before Harry could be usefully manipulated.

On the other hand, Draco didn't think Holder was against them now, though her behavior this morning had been odd. He turned to greet the rest of the comitatus, resolving to focus on the challenges in front of him while keeping an eye open for the rest.

He smiled grimly when he had that thought. Of course he could do that. He had one eye now to spare, after all.

* * *

"Did it work?" That was Hermione, leaning forwards in interest, thinking as much about the process of putting in the magical eye as about the potential abilities it would give Draco, Harry knew.

"Is he our battle leader again?" That was Herricks, his arms folded and his voice so determinedly neutral that Harry would have rolled his eyes if he hadn't thought Herricks would notice him doing it.

Ventus and Ron were silent, but they had bright-open, hopeful expressions. It touched Harry to see the one on Ron's face. Ron had grieved over Draco's lost eye more for Harry's sake than Draco's, but it seemed as though that was enough to make him happy Draco might finally be getting it back.

"It worked," Harry said. "He can see out of the eye." He thought he would leave it open to Draco to speak about the magic he could see. He might want to keep it silent, a secret advantage even from those who knew him best, for now. "But," he added, as they started to crowd towards the tent, "I want to tell you something before you go in there."

Hermione halted as though she were bracing herself for bad news. Ventus and Ron simply looked impatient. Herricks looked as if he alone had some idea of what was coming next, and glared at Harry.

"I don't want anyone speaking as though this change weakens him or makes him less handsome," Harry said. "The eye glows, and that might disconcert you. But if you imply as much, I'll hurt you."

Hermione blinked. "Malfoy chose the eye, though. He must have thought about the way he'd look with it. He's not as blind to personal appearances as you are, Harry," she added, and Harry couldn't tell which of them she meant to compliment. Maybe neither.

"Yes, but Draco's realized that he can't control the thoughts people have about him." Harry caught Herricks's eye. "He can only refuse to accept insults. But there are subtler ways of insulting him, especially when you're working closely with him, which isn't something that most of the trainees and the Aurors do. So I want you to act as if you're happy and _nothing else. _Like I said. Insult him, and I'll hurt you."

Ron nodded and touched Harry once on the shoulder before he walked past him. Hermione went with a backwards glance. Ventus sighed as if the whole discussion bored her and ducked into the tent. Herricks lingered behind her. He had an effective glare when he wanted to use it, Harry thought. He looked coolly back until Herricks rolled his eyes and turned away.

"I know that you were talking about me," he said. "It couldn't have been more obvious."

"I know the way your mind works," Harry said, not raising his voice. "I know that you might think Draco is weak again because of the way the eye makes him look, and because a magical eye can't _possibly _be as effective as a real one. You gave your promise to Draco, but you didn't make any promise to me."

"I've kept my promise so far." Herricks's arms crossed more tightly.

"It's been two days," Harry pointed out tartly. "I meant it, Herricks. You could attack him again; we both know you could. And we know that you'd lose. But this time, you would suffer even if you won."

Herricks exhaled and glanced away. "Don't worry, Potter," he said. "Malfoy has proved to me that he has the will and the determination of a leader, as well as the battle spells. It'll be better now that he also has the ability to judge distances and see the world the way other people do. Trust me," he added, when Harry opened his mouth. "I know—there are reasons I could despise him. But now I'm not _trying _to."

He went, and Harry had to be content with that.

Coming into the tent, he saw Draco in the middle of the comitatus, receiving their congratulations and comments like a king with his courtiers. And from the intent way he peered at them, Harry was sure he saw their magic, and also that he didn't see fit to warn them he did.

Harry briefly caught Draco's eye—both of them—and smiled as broadly as he could.

_Merlin, I'm proud of him._

Draco flushed slightly as he ducked his head back.


	31. To Begin To Move

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Thirty-One—To Begin To Move_

"Trainee Potter."

Harry started badly. He had been on his way back to his and Draco's tent after a private session with Ketchum; Harry was still having trouble with some of the more advanced tactics that Ketchum was showing their class. There was just too much thinking ahead, and Harry knew he wasn't good at that, and he didn't particularly want to _become _good at it. Thinking on his feet had served him well so far, and why couldn't he go on doing it? But Ketchum insisted, so Harry attended the lessons twice a week.

He turned around and met Holder's eyes. She stood there with something long, flat, and wrapped in paper held in her hands. From the care with which she held it, Harry thought it might have been a mirror, but he wasn't sure.

"You must come with me," Holder said. "I have something to show you." She turned and walked away as though in no doubt that he would follow.

"Why can't you tell me what it is?" Harry asked, not moving. Another thing he had a bad track record with, besides thinking ahead, was people summoning him mysteriously and not telling him what it was for. "We're near the tent, and I know that you'll want to see Draco, too."

Holder paused and turned back towards him, more curious about his words than Harry would have thought she would be. "Why do you assume that?"

"Because I'll only tell him anyway, even if you order me to keep it quiet," Harry said patiently. "And because, in the pair of us, he's the thinker."

"Yet you were the one who made the alliance with Gawain and me," Holder said.

"That was an act of rash madness," Harry said, calmly quoting the description Draco had given him. He'd come to accept that he probably could have done better things than go to Holder with all their information like that, but it had turned out all right as well as eased the immediate need to be moving around and doing something. "Don't you want to wait for him?"

"I have spoken with Portillo Lopez about some of her theoretical conclusions concerning your magic," Holder said, which Harry thought was a stupid answer to his question until she continued. "She has told me nothing private, but has given me much food for thought, and that thought has led to a possible way of defeating Nihil. I believe that we will need Trainee Malfoy's help in the end, but if he tries to take over in the beginning, as he is prone to, then he will only hinder the efforts we need from you."

Harry licked his lips. He wanted to laugh aloud with hope at her words, and also with derision. Everyone they knew had been trying to think of a way to defeat Nihil, and now Holder just happened along and blithely announced that she'd thought of one?

"I still trust Draco more than I trust you," he said. "And if we're allies now, then you should want to lay out the truth in front of the whole comitatus, so that everyone understands the same things and they can ask questions I wouldn't think of. There's no reason to want to confine some of it exclusively to me unless you're planning to set us against each other."

"And here I thought Trainee Malfoy was the paranoid one." Holder watched him with eyes squinting as though against strong sunlight. "You do realize, Trainee Potter, that you sound as though you _don't_ trust me?"

"I can't help what I sound like," Harry said. "I'm doing this in front of Draco, whatever it is, or not at all."

He was prepared for Holder to shout, or storm, or step coldly away. Instead, she gave him a faint smile and a nod. "Good," she murmured. "I wondered how strong the loyalty would be between you and Trainee Malfoy. I think that we will need both of you, in the end, and you must depend on each other."

She placed the package in Harry's arms—Harry staggered beneath its weight, and the carved frame that told him, yes, this was a mirror—and then strode ahead. "Come with me," she called over her shoulder. "The sooner we reach your tent, the sooner we can find Trainee Malfoy and I can send you for the rest of the comitatus."

Harry shook his head from side to side, feeling as though he had to clear wax out of his ears. He might understand _individuals, _he thought as he followed Holder, like Draco or Ron, but he would never understand pure-bloods as a whole, or their ways of scheming even around someone who was an ally, or their little "tests."

* * *

Draco leaned forwards, staring, when Holder whipped the cloth from the mirror. This was the first object he had seen where the magic blazed and shimmered around it the way that it did around people. Draco had accepted that he simply _couldn't _see the magic of inanimate things, having tested wands, knives, cups, and mirrors in the past few days, which was a pity, as it would have been a good method of spotting traps.

Either the mirror was powerful, or this was in some way an imitation of human magic. From the dark surface that faced them, showing no reflection from the eight people clustered in the tent—the comitatus plus Holder and Portillo Lopez—Draco was inclined to think it might be both. The surface showed a few faint and far sparks of stars, but then Draco moved his head and the stars changed. The constellations he had half-traced between them, out of habit from Hogwarts Astronomy classes, clashed and blurred and became completely unfamiliar. He narrowed his eyes and turned to Holder.

"What is this?" he asked. Granger, who had opened her mouth at the same time, probably to ask the same question, closed her mouth, looking annoyed.

"An artifact from the Ministry," Holder said, turning and casting the mirror as much of a glance of affection as Draco thought he had seen her give at any person or thing, Robards excepted. "The Mirror of Secifircas."

Granger was quicker than Draco this time, though no doubt he would have done better if it was written down. "The Mirror of Sacrifices?" she asked, looking both delighted and appalled. Draco knew her well enough by now to realize that the delight came from new knowledge. "Is it like the Mirror of Erised?"

"Very like." Holder gave Granger the same faint smile she had sometimes worn around Draco, which made Draco wonder if they would have made a good apprentice-and-mentor team. "But the Mirror of Erised shows the heart's desire. The Mirror of Secifircas shows the price that must be paid to achieve one's desire."

Draco shook his head. He could see Holder's plan now, but he thought it so simple that he didn't know why she hadn't brought it up before. "So it could show us how to defeat Nihil? Why didn't you bring this mirror out weeks ago?"

Holder gave him a dark look. She hated being accused of stupidity, Draco knew, even if it was in so many words rather than in a direct complaint. "Because not everyone can see the truth in this mirror," she answered. "It is a very limited artifact, of historical curiosity more than anything else. First, the one who gazes into it must have the goal as her _true_ heart's desire, rather than simply telling herself she does. It is rare that real desire and real goal match. Almost always, someone who thinks herself committed to one war or one plan or one secret discovers that her lusts tend in another direction. Second, the person who gazes into it must have made a dear sacrifice in pursuit of that goal." She looked at Draco's eye.

Draco found it hard to breathe. He didn't know if Holder realized the honor she had done him, and if she didn't, he didn't care to enlighten her, but this… This was a way to _use _the damage that Nihil had inflicted on him, to make the sacrifice worth something.

"That's impossible," Granger said, and then answered herself. "No, with the right combination of magical theory and reality, I could see it happening. But—I never thought of something like that." Her voice sank into a mutter.

Draco resisted the temptation to say that magic would still go on and still exist even if Granger never learned anything again. He didn't need Harry's warning hand on his elbow to hold him back, either. That much, he had learned about the members of his comitatus. He glanced up and lifted an eyebrow at Holder, and she nodded and moved out of the way, gesturing towards the mirror as if introducing it to him.

Draco moved forwards and stared into the mirror.

For long moments, he saw nothing except the swirling darkness, painted with those faint spots of light, and had to fight down the fear that either Holder had been mistaken about the weight of his sacrifice or that she had brought a fake mirror here to mock him. Then, just as Harry's fingers clamped down on his arm again, the darkness changed to a light-drenched vision.

The light was heavy, like smoke, and eddied in the same way. Draco squinted to focus his eyes. It was the same sight-tearing color as the yellow glamour that Nihil had sometimes appeared wrapped in, too, and he didn't know if his magical eye could see it as well as the eye of flesh and blood. He didn't think so, just based on how difficult it was for him to sort out figures from background.

But then the scene seemed to wrench sideways and snap a bit, and Draco was looking at the glamour Nihil had worn before, the glamour that melted into various configurations of mirrors and voices and faces, and, before him, one of the hovering dark balls of nothingness. Draco tried to see the surroundings, but the only thing he could make out for sure was a wall of stone. They seemed to be underground, which would make sense if he was using the Death Eater caches as headquarters.

Nihil cupped what could have been a hand or a paw or a fin around the ball of nothingness and stared at it lovingly. Then he blew on the ball and released it. Draco watched breathlessly as it soared up and hovered under the roof of the cavern. They hadn't seen the one they'd discovered do that. He wondered what else Nihil could do to manipulate the balls, and how long it would be before he grew too powerful for them to stop.

Then he reminded himself that the mirror was supposed to show him a vision of what he could do to _defeat_ Nihil, not simply something for him to marvel at, and leaned even closer, doing his best to understand.

Nihil stepped back, his mask tilted towards the ball. Draco couldn't see his eyes—if he had any—but the pose was suggestive of longing to him. Nihil wanted to dive into the ball and become part of it, absorbed and ruthlessly taken away. Of course, that was what he wanted for all creation. Draco thought he must have been capable of entering the ball of nothingness himself if he wanted to, and wondered why he didn't try.

Nihil turned, or did something that might have been turning on his heel in a normal person. His glamoured body grew smaller and smaller, thinning and wisping and breaking apart. It was painful to watch, and Draco shuddered. Harry's hand tightened on his arm again.

The last of Nihil flowed into the ball, and then the ball was left, hovering there. Draco blinked. Perhaps this was a vision of how they could get rid of Nihil after all, but if so, he didn't understand it. Nor did he understand what they would do with the ball of nothingness after Nihil was done, which obviously couldn't be allowed to remain in the world. And wasn't _that _a humiliating admission to take back to Holder and the comitatus that depended on him?

Someone stepped forwards.

The sight of Draco's eyes faltered for the first time since it had adjusted to the scene in the mirror. There was something about the figure that he couldn't glimpse. Perhaps it came wrapped in another heavy glamour like Nihil's; perhaps someone from the future couldn't be accurately defined even by an artifact as powerful as the Mirror of Secifircas. Whatever the cause, Draco saw nothing that would enable him to identify the person, should he see him, or her, or it, again.

The figure lifted up hands that shone with light and enfolded the ball of nothingness in them. Its hands blazed all the brighter when that was done. Draco told himself to remember that, the bright, clear light that came from them and cut through the heavy, smoke-like radiance in the cavern. The figure brought the clasped hands to its mouth and breathed on them, and then opened them. The ball of nothingness was gone.

A moment later, so was the vision in the mirror.

Draco stepped back and released a shaky breath. Harry moved with him, laying his head on Draco's shoulder. Draco stroked his hair. He often underestimated how much seeing him go through something like this overwhelmed Harry. He should try not to forget it. After all, Harry had himself confessed that he did crazy things sometimes because he couldn't stand to see the people he loved in danger.

"Well?" Holder asked, her voice edged with glass. "What did you see?"

Draco shook his head slightly and turned around. "Nihil lifting up one of those balls of nothingness that we discovered before," he said. "He looked at it as if he loved it. Then he was gone into it. His body broke up."

Holder's brow pinched. "And you saw no sign of a weapon?" she demanded, not bothering to hide the disappointment in her tone. "I had thought for sure that the Mirror would show you a weapon."

"I don't know," Draco said. "I would wager, though, that the truest desire in my heart is to get rid of Nihil, and that what I saw was the way to do it. Someone else came into being after Nihil was gone, held the ball of nothingness, blew on its hands, and opened them to show that the ball was gone."

"What is this figure?" Holder said. "Its name? Its nature?"

Draco shook his head. "It was clad in light, like but not the same as the light around Nihil. I don't know what it was. It might not even have been human, despite the hands I saw."

Holder whirled around and kicked at the side of the tent, not even wincing when her boot ripped straight through the cloth. A low, steady stream of curses emerged from her mouth. Draco ignored her to turn and face the Mirror of Secifircas again.

"Will it grant me more than one vision?" he asked. "If I went away and then returned to focus my thoughts in a different direction, would it grant me a different answer?"

"How many different answers can there be?" Holder closed her eyes in what looked like hatred mixed with resignation. Hatred of the situation, Draco thought, not of him, or he would have worried about his back. "No, I don't think that you should ask again. There's no way that it would tell you the truth any more openly."

"But that wasn't the whole vision," Harry said.

Draco felt his neck prickle, and turned to stare. Harry was watching both him and Holder with a slightly nervous, defiant tilt to his head. Draco had to swallow twice before he could answer. "What do you mean, Harry?"

"I saw it, too," Harry said.

* * *

Harry didn't know why they all stared at him as if he had another head on his shoulders. He had seen the vision from the moment that it started appearing in the mirror, and he had seen the same things that Draco had seen. Or, at least, he hadn't had reason to think he didn't until now, when Draco told part of the vision and then stopped.

"Why did you see it?" Draco whispered. His voice whirled and blurred with emotions. Harry shook his head. It sounded as though Draco was almost _jealous_, which didn't make sense. Surely the more people who saw the vision and could help to interpret it to the comitatus, the better? Despite the details Draco had given, Harry thought he didn't know what the vision _meant_, any more than Holder did.

"I don't know," Harry said. "I've been touched by Nihil, too, though. Maybe that counts as enough of a sacrifice for the mirror."

"I've given up," Draco said, and then stopped the sentence short, turning his head away.

Harry grabbed his shoulder. He knew what Draco was going to say: that he had given up more than Harry had in the battle against Nihil and deserved to have this vision alone. Harry did understand, but he couldn't change things, since he had seen it, too, and Holder was already leaning forwards as though she intended to suck the vision out of him by force.

"What else did you see?" she asked.

Harry glanced at Draco, but he said nothing else, standing there stubbornly. Harry sighed and answered. "The shining figure faded. I saw a book on a table. It was a large book, like a grimoire, bound in red and gold. The cover might have had a keyhole on it. The book opened, and a ball of nothingness was sitting in it. It didn't have pages, though. It was hollow. Then the book shut, and I knew the ball of nothingness was gone."

"How did you know?" Holder was practically in his face now, her nose driving in like the beak of a hawk.

Harry shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. I was just certain."

"A hollow book," Hermione murmured, her eyes closed and a frown line between them. "Do you think it was like one of those books that people sometimes keep on their shelves to hide secrets in, Harry? Did it look like that?"

Harry nodded eagerly. He had known the book looked familiar, but the Muggle cultural reference helped him. "Yes! Like that. As if the book was only made as a container to look like a book from the outside, not actually meant to hold pages. I didn't see any place where you could have fastened pages."

Hermione made a soft, thoughtful noise in the back of her throat, but Holder got there before she could.

"A container," she said. "A box. And the figure that Trainee Malfoy saw was enfolding the ball of nothingness in his hands. Perhaps we should look for a way to surround the nothingness with something that will hold it, after we have banished Nihil back into the nothingness."

"How are we going to do that?" Ron asked. "What can you _enfold _nothingness with? Won't it just get out and leak back into the world?"

Harry nodded to Ron. Just like Hermione's image of the empty book, those words were the objection he would have liked to have made but couldn't think of how to phrase. Holder turned to answer Ron, but Herricks interrupted, his voice quiet and firm.

"Surround nothingness with existence," he said. "Malfoy said that the light around the figure wasn't the same as the light around Nihil. I've caught a glimpse of that glamour in Ursula's memories, and I think I know what he means. Nihil's light is the light of headache, of fever, the kind that you see when you press down on your eyelids. But the light on the figure Malfoy saw was the _real _light. What's the opposite of nothingness? Reality."

"And how are we going to wrap something up in reality?" Hermione was looking around as though she wanted parchment and ink so that she could write down the suggestions that flew through her head. Hermione had never trusted that people wouldn't just forget brilliant ideas, Harry thought, amused. "There's no way to summon or contain reality itself, as far as I know."

"There are ways," Holder said, eyes fired with a glory that made it hard to look at her. Harry thought he knew now why Robards had chosen her for his second-in-command. She wasn't particularly skilled at holding the good will of her subordinates, but in moments like this, she would be capable of leading them. "There must be ways. Now that we know what the weapon should be made of, we can make one, as Malfoy and Potter made weapons out of the void." She turned and strode towards the entrance from the tent as though the walls around her were firm barriers separating her from the completion of such a weapon.

"Auror Holder," Draco said, his voice strained and dry. "What about the Mirror of Secifircas?"

"It can remain here for the moment," Holder said over her shoulder. "I'll send someone to fetch it soon." And she vanished, and left a whirlwind of emotion behind as a reminder of her passing. Harry shook his head in wonder. He would have actually liked her to stay, for the first time since they started being allies, because he took comfort from her certainty and energy.

Draco's face said that he _didn't _want people to stay, though, and they began to drift away. Portillo Lopez was looking thoughtful. Harry took that for a hopeful sign.

When even she was gone, he turned to Draco and asked, bluntly, because he couldn't think of any other way to do it, "Why were you so upset that I saw the vision?"

* * *

Draco grimaced. He had dreaded trying to explain this to Harry, but he had known he would have to, because Harry wasn't the kind of person who would let a lover's anger go undiscussed.

And Draco was a bit ashamed of the way he had reacted—which only contributed to his dread, of course.

He licked his lips. "Seeing the vision made me feel as if my sacrifice could be worth something," he said. "When you could see it, too—it seemed that what I suffered under Nihil, and the usefulness of my having lost an eye, was mitigated. I'm—sorry." The words stuck in his throat. The joy he had felt when Holder explained the Mirror's nature was a private joy, and exposing it this way still felt awkward and wrong.

But Harry smiled at him. "I understand," he said. "And to be honest, I didn't think at all about what I'd suffered under Nihil, or that it was comparable to your sacrifice."

Draco leaned forwards and kissed him, deeply, urgently. He was reminded all over again of what kind of person Harry was, and why he had fallen in love with him, and he vowed—if he could keep the vow—not to forget again.

Harry laughed, bright-eyed and happy, and did something with his hands and his tongue that gave Draco another reason to be glad that everyone had left.


	32. On Strings of Bone

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Thirty-Two—On Strings of Bone_

"What exactly are we going to do about Nemo?"

Gregory launched the question at Draco like a dart as she stepped into the middle of their tent. Draco started. He hadn't noticed her coming in, probably because he was involved in the book of tactics essays that Ketchum had given him. It was still unforgivable that he hadn't noticed, he thought as he laid the tome down, and the ability of his eye to see the wild purple and green magic that coruscated around her didn't make up for the lapse.

"How much information have you got out of him?" he asked.

Gregory shook her head. "I don't believe he's numb to the torture, but there's a point past which he simply starts babbling whatever he thinks will make me leave him alone," she said with professional disgust. Draco nodded. That had been Granger's one objection against torture which actually sounded valid to him. "I frighten him too much. All he has to do now is see me, and he closes his eyes. And I believe that what he knows is limited. While Nihil might not be willing to destroy him, he must realize by now where he is and what we've learned from him."

Draco nodded, leaning back in his chair. "But I wonder why he's not willing to destroy him," he murmured. "He's certainly done it to other servants of his without hesitation. It would be good if we could find out."

"There might be a way." Gregory was wearing a shark's grin. Draco waited for her to finish the sentence, but she simply stood by his chair, waiting. Draco gave in finally and asked.

"Well? What is it?"

"If we take him apart," Gregory said. "Break him down to the essentials. We already know that most of the others Nihil took over or created weren't really _bodies. _They were empty sacks filled with the grief magic or Nihil's will. We didn't get the chance to do the same with Nusquam, not truly, since she was already dead by the time we thought to try. Nemo might be our only chance."

Draco could see why she had come to him. He didn't think there was any other member of the comitatus, or the Aurors who supported them, who would have considered such a thing instead of crying out in horror. He leaned back and thought it over carefully. Gregory stood as motionless as a statue beside him.

"I don't think we can do it," he said at last. "Nihil would destroy Nemo when he found out that we were destroying him, rather than allow us to discover any secrets. Maybe that's the reason he hasn't done so already, because he still thinks that we haven't learned anything very important."

Gregory scowled. Draco knew she had a personal grudge against Nihil, who, when he was still posing as Daffyd Dearborn, had framed her and forced her into temporary exile from the Aurors. "What do you suggest, then?"

The perfect solution occurred to Draco, and he climbed to his feet, his face covered with a small smile. "Let me see to him." He tapped the skin beneath his magical eye.

Gregory didn't look as happy about that as she had been about the prospect of torture, but she nodded and led the way.

* * *

"I want to know when we'll go into battle again."

Harry shook his head. Ventus had been more silent than usual in Lowell and Weston's class, and hadn't spoken at all in Ketchum's, although she usually asked questions that would force him to clarify minor matters. His class was mostly about defense, and Harry knew she was bad at that. But today, she simply stood there with her eyes on the ground, and now she was staring at Harry as though he could do something about her question.

"I'm not the battle leader of the comitatus," he pointed out. "Why don't you ask the man who is?"

"I did go to your tent first," Ventus said, tossing her head forwards, as though it was a minor matter to have run from the outskirts of camp where Ketchum trained them all the way to the center and then back again, to join the more slowly walking Harry. "He's not there." She fixed her stare on Harry again.

Harry halted, wondering where Draco could be, but then he shrugged and kept walking. After all, Draco had business of his own, and homework for the classes, and the deep pondering that he seemed intent on doing over the vision in the Mirror of Secifircas, as if it were incumbent on him to come up with the answer to the problem of Nihil and the balls of nothingness. "Well, then wait until he comes back."

"I want to act _now_."

Harry looked at her again. Ventus had a tight set to her face that made Harry cautious. Her skin looked as if it was pulled taut over her cheekbones, for that matter, and her hands clutched and swished her wand with unnecessary emphasis. Harry narrowed his eyes in concern and touched her arm, making her stop and stare at him.

"Are you all right?" he asked. He wondered if she was having disturbing dreams the way Hermione had, or a row with Herricks.

Ventus laughed. A few people walking by stopped to stare, and then hurried on as Ventus met their eyes with some scorn. "Yes, of course I am. But I want to fight. It feels like there's a fire burning in me that I need fodder for. If it goes out—" She pinched her fingers together like someone snuffing a candle.

Harry grunted. He recognized the sensation. It was the way he had felt right after Draco lost his eye, the emotion that had driven him to confront Holder and bargain for an alliance instead of antagonism.

He wasn't sure what to suggest, though, except the obvious. "We need to solve the problem of what to do about Nihil before we can decide when and where and how we're going to fight him," he said as gently as he could.

Ventus pulled herself to attention and stared up at him. "Of course," she said. "I should have thought of that. _I _should have thought of that." And she turned and marched away from Harry, her head up and her hands clenched into fists at her sides. Her stride was eager, though, so Harry thought she was happy instead of frustrated.

"Ventus?" he called after her. "What are you doing?"

Ventus bobbed her head at him. "Going to solve the problem, of course!" she responded, and then vanished. More people shook their heads and hurried on. Harry snorted. He appreciated Ventus for the way she had supported Draco into leadership when Ron and Hermione and even Draco himself were uncertain that he had any skills in that direction, but the rest of the time, she lacked certain safeguards.

"Mental, mate," was the way Ron summed it up when Harry went to join him for dinner. Draco still hadn't reappeared, and Hermione was doing lessons with Raverat at the moment, trying to learn the delicate mental operations that were as much as anyone knew about being a Seer.

Harry nodded and applied himself to the thick, blazing beef soup that the Aurors had provided for them.

* * *

Draco walked around the bound and sitting Nemo. Nemo stared at him with hatred, but it was a weary hatred, Draco thought. He looked close to breaking, either from the torture or the fact that his creator hadn't rescued him yet.

When he first walked into the tent, Draco had caught a glimpse of the colors that swarmed around Nemo, but he hadn't understood them. He had needed these longer looks to be sure of what he was seeing and how the pieces fit together. Now, after a few hours of study and several acerbic comments from Gregory, he thought he did know.

"Well?" Gregory asked, the way that Draco had when she wanted him to ask what she'd thought of for Nemo's torture.

Draco raised a hand for silence and took a step back, focusing his magical eye while he shut the normal one. He had noticed that doing that made the magic he was seeing spring more fully into being, enhanced its colors, and isolated the sometimes strange shapes that he was trying to comprehend.

The colors here scythed back and forth, and then settled down. They shone red and black, and in the middle of them, there was a central, calm balancing point where Draco could see only a hole, rather than a color. Or perhaps not. He concentrated harder, and a sullen black spark shone out of the hole, too.

"Magically, he's not human," he said. "You and Harry and anyone else I've looked at have colors that dance all around them. They never slow down, although some of them move less wildly than others." He was starting to think that the movement of the magic he saw had something to do with personality—Harry's magic and Gregory's were wilder than the controlled power he and Portillo Lopez shared—but he didn't see any reason to say that right now and either bore or insult Gregory. "But he has a hole in the middle. I think it shows the nothingness that created him."

Nemo turned his head and stared at that. But he turned it away again when Draco tried to make eye contact with him.

"What does that mean, then?" Gregory was tapping her foot against the floor. "Can we use it?"

"I'll have to see," Draco said. He didn't want to confess all his plans in front of their prisoner, and he wasn't sure that he wanted Gregory knowing all about them, either. Gregory was too prone to think that she had a better idea and implement it without consulting anyone else. "But I think so, yes."

He said that more to worry Nemo than for any other reason. Nemo shuddered once, but he kept his head bowed, and Draco was satisfied that they wouldn't have got much out of him even if he had let Gregory go ahead with her torture plans. He moved towards the flap of the tent, and Gregory joined him after pausing briefly to check the wards and confining spells around Nemo.

"That magical eye of yours is good for something after all, Malfoy." Gregory gave the air in front of her a fierce grin, and then jerked her head at Draco. "You should come to my lessons sometime soon. You have to build your battle prowess up again."

And she was gone, striding away with her cloak swirling behind her. Draco rolled his eyes and turned for the tent. He hoped that Harry was back so that he could eat.

Of course he wasn't, and Draco ended up eating alone, a cold meal of bread and cheese, since he couldn't be bothered to cook and didn't want to go to the common tents. That was all right. He thought he would have found the conversation a distraction, anyway. His mind was busy with the hole that he had seen in the center of Nemo's aura and what it could mean.

The place where the different pieces of the grief magic came together? The empty place in the center of reality which Nihil left behind when he scooped out the magic to make his creations in the first place? And what were they going to do about it if it was a hole? Or if it was a nothingness, rather than something in itself? Draco didn't yet know. He thought they could use it to damage Nihil.

Perhaps. He wished irritably that the vision in the Mirror of Secifircas had shown them something about _that_, too.

The tent flap tugged back, and Harry came in. Draco looked up and nodded at him. His mouth and mind were both full, and he didn't feel much like starting a conversation right now.

"Ventus was looking for you," Harry said, sitting down in the center of the tent and turning his face towards the fire. Draco glanced swiftly at him, but it was hard to tell from his voice and his expression in profile what he was feeling. "She wanted to know when the battle would start. I told her that we couldn't be certain of that until we knew how to fight Nihil, and she bounced off saying that she would figure out a way."

Draco laughed, causing crumbs of bread and cheese to spray against the opposite wall of the tent. He shook his head and immediately banished them with a flick of his wand. He _never _did things like that.

Harry seemed to realize that, too, but after one glance and one quick curl of his lip, he demurely returned his gaze to his lap.

"Her and everyone else in our little alliance," Draco murmured, as he put down the last bite of his sandwich. He would rather not eat it; watching his own mess had rather killed his appetite. "I wouldn't look for the answer to come from that direction."

Harry hooked his shoulder up in a little shrug, to indicate that he neither agreed nor disagreed. "I don't know. She looked the way I feel when I know that I'm not going to be able to rest unless I do something productive—the night I hunted down Holder, for example. So long as she doesn't endanger the rest of us, maybe she'll really find something."

"I have no faith in her judgment," Draco said, and leaned back in his chair, stretching his feet out ahead of him. He was more eager to tell Harry what he had found in Nemo's aura than listen to stories about Ventus.

"She was the one who first judged that you would be a fine leader," Harry said, quirking his lips at Draco. "So does not trusting her include that side of her judgment?"

Draco crumpled up his napkin and threw it at Harry. Harry ducked it, laughing, and ended up on his back in the middle of the tent, grinning at Draco. Draco took a moment to absorb the sight of him, and then sighed. He would have to disturb Harry's amusement. If nothing else, Harry would be unsure of what to make of the hole in Nemo.

"I went with Gregory to look at Nemo's magic," he said. "We should kill him or get rid of him soon, but I wanted to see what my magical eye would make of his magic and his power before that happened."

Harry sat up immediately, his face becoming gratifyingly sober. "And what did your eye tell you?"

Draco sighed. "That there's a hole there, or perhaps a place where the magic simply ceases to exist. I wonder if Nusquam had something like the same thing? But of course, it's impossible to know that now."

"Could we reach into that hole and pull something out of it?" Harry asked. "Use it as a back door into the void where Nihil lives?"

"Exists," Draco corrected. The more he thought about it, the more he was certain that Nihil didn't live in any traditional sense of the word, no matter how many times he could resurrect himself. "And I don't know. That would depend on what it is, whether it's dangerous to touch, whether magic exists there or ceases to exist… I don't know."

Harry nodded his understanding. "Well, perhaps Ventus will find something."

Draco looked around, but he didn't have another napkin to throw.

* * *

Harry woke in the night to a thrumming that traveled all the way through his bones. He sat up and stared around, but he wasn't sure what it was, only that it was _there_, indisputably _there_, hammering at him and making him wince. He glanced to the side, to see if it was an earthquake, but Draco lay sleeping peacefully in the bed beside him, and no objects shook.

He slid slowly out of bed, placing one hand on his wand. No one appeared at the entrance to his tent, and no one was making a sound in the camp that he could hear. Of course, no one else appeared to be feeling that thrumming in their bones, either, which made Harry start to worry about all the _un_heard sounds.

He reached over and shook Draco, but Draco only sighed and mumbled, opened his magical eye, said, "Go back to sleep, Harry," and went back to sleep himself.

Harry stared at him for a second. That wasn't supposed to happen, was it? He had woken Draco because he had thought that Draco would want to know that something was strange rather than Harry going adventuring by himself. Draco should be interested and concerned, not more invested in sleep.

Well, Harry might not have made the worrying aspect of the situation sufficiently clear. He shook Draco harder, and this time Draco flopped and snored and didn't even open his eyes.

Harry shook again, clamping his hands on Draco's shoulders and putting some strength into it. And still nothing happened, other than Draco's mouth opening and a slow line of drool sliding down his chin.

Harry swallowed and stood. The thrumming in his bones was worse now, bearing down, acting as if it would grind the marrow to pieces. Yes, he did believe that reality had shifted again or Nihil was about to attack the camp or—something. But he seemed to be the only one who could sense it or stay awake during it.

He stepped out of the tent and cast a spell that flared a slender beam of light straight ahead, reaching much further but also casting much less radiance than a _Lumos _Charm. Harry used it to sweep the guard positions that he knew were near the tent. The guards were slumped asleep at their posts, chins resting on their chests the same way as had happened with Draco.

Harry shuddered with what he didn't even try to pretend was an emotion other than fear and wheeled to run back inside. He had to shelter Draco from any storm, attack, or earthquake that hit them.

Then someone near him hissed, and Harry nearly took her head off with an ill-placed Blasting Curse. Portillo Lopez formed out of the darkness, staring at him in a way that suggested she would have come back from the dead and haunted him about the Blasting Curse if he had managed to succeed.

"What is it?" Harry whispered. "What's happening? Why are we the only ones awake?"

A pale face loomed at Portillo Lopez's shoulder, and Raverat's voice said, "I'm awake, too. But no one else, I think, unless there's a member of the Order in camp that I don't know about. Maryam?"

Portillo Lopez shook her head, keeping her nose uplifted as if she would scent the danger coming towards her rather than feel it. "This is Nihil's work," she said. "He has finally noticed that the forces of life and death are out of balance, or perhaps he has finally learned how to use them. Sleep and death are closely related, in some ways. It makes sense that he would strike through sleep." She touched the middle of her back, where Harry thought one of her marks swearing her to her Order rested. "Our vows protect us."

"What about me, then?" Harry demanded. "Does my scar do something?"

"The scars on your soul," Raverat whispered, "from your encounter with Nihil. We told you that your magic had been affected and changed by that."

Harry grimaced. This was the kind of distinction he could have done without, despite the opportunity it gave him to protect Draco and others. The thrumming in his bones kept him awake, but _told _him nothing. "What do we have to do to defeat him?"

"We cannot be certain until we see the shape of his attack," said Portillo Lopez, reaching out one hand. Raverat clasped it. To Harry's astonishment, she extended the other to him, and then stared at Harry until he took it. "But we can ready a defense that we can aim in any one of several different directions once we gain enough information."

Harry licked lips that had gone dry. "I don't know the same things you do. And what about Draco?"

"He will remain asleep, no matter what you do," Portillo Lopez said. "And you waste time and lives by running to him, when we need you to help us defend the camp." She closed her eyes and seemed to balance on a tightwire, from the expression she adopted. Raverat was looking much the same way.

"Tell me what to do," Harry demanded in a whisper, but they didn't listen to him. When he tried to pull his hand away, Portillo Lopez clamped her fingers down. Her grip was as strong and icy as that of any of the corpses Nihil could summon. Harry grimaced and stood still instead, trying to listen and divine the nature of the threat that way. He still couldn't hear anything, and he wondered why Portillo Lopez and Raverat were whispering.

_Perhaps because Nihil can hear us, _he thought then, and winced.

The thrumming grew worse, to a pitch that made Harry's teeth chatter. He thought Portillo Lopez would snap at him about that, but she didn't. She remained still, and so did Raverat, other than her grip on Harry's hand growing firmer.

Then she cried aloud, "Leonard, it's up through the circle, up through the center!" and slammed her arm down. Harry's hand was pulled with hers by force, and he yelped, a sound that no one paid any attention to. Both Portillo Lopez and Raverat were chanting as though their lives depended on it, and of _course _Harry couldn't help, because of _course _he didn't have any idea what they were doing or how he could be involved in it.

But the thrumming was still there, shaking his teeth, and he discovered that he had to close his eyes. And a separate line of the thrumming ran up his arm from Portillo Lopez's hand, making Harry wonder for one instant if she was really in the service of Nihil instead of opposed to him. Draco, with his ability to see magic, would know.

The thrumming burst apart.

Harry found himself in the center of an enormous ring of black and red, the red raining down from above as flames, the black opening beneath him as a void. He did the first thing that came to mind and snatched at the sides of the abyss, trying to draw them back together so that he would have somewhere to stand.

Living snakes shot out of his arms, brilliant silver-white serpents that grabbed the sides of the void and held it steady. Harry glanced up at the falling flames, and another snake curled out of his forehead, a cobra with wide-spread hood that shielded him like an umbrella against the deadly rain.

Harry licked his lips. This was good, right? He knew that his not-really-necromancy, the magic that Portillo Lopez seemed to think he could use against Nihil, was based on illusions of snakes. So he must be doing something right.

But the air in front of him congealed, and nothingness came to life there. It turned to face him, and Harry screamed, because it felt like tar flowing in at his eyelids, hooks tearing his brain, earth smothering his mouth.

This, he knew for the one instant he still had clarity of thought, was Nihil's true face.

Then Nihil hit him, and Harry found himself trying desperately to stay alive.


	33. Nothing Out of Nothing

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Thirty-Three—Nothing Out of Nothing_

Harry didn't know how he could fight Nihil. The blows that fell on him came from all directions, and felt like stabs and cuts and slices that went directly to his soul, and he reeled from them, and he was sure that he would fall over beneath them any moment and never be able to stand back up.

But he commanded his snakes to attack anyway. The silver snakes that had held him to the sides of the void struck out at Nihil, hissing, and the cobra on his head opened its mouth and launched a devastating fall of poison.

Nihil didn't seem to dodge them, but he also didn't seem affected by them. The fangs and the poison simply fell into darkness and didn't come back. The silver snakes attached to Harry struggled for a moment and then vanished. The cobra was still there, dancing alertly back and forth, but that didn't matter if its one weapon wouldn't hurt Nihil.

And meanwhile the void beneath him shuddered hungrily, and the flames came down from overhead, so that Harry had to tell the cobra to attend to them again.

He flailed beneath the blows that continued to rain down with the fire, feeling as though they were tearing away tiny parts of his soul that fell to the ground and spiraled into the void. Merlin knew what Nihil would do with them once he had them. Probably eat them or toss them away, the way his beast had with Draco's eye.

The thought of Draco strengthened Harry. He couldn't give in, feeling sorry for himself, and allow Nihil to do whatever he wanted, because Draco was asleep and helpless, and depending on Harry to protect him.

Harry rose up against the pain, the way he had against the pain of realizing what Dumbledore was really like, and the pain of Dumbledore's death and Sirius's, and the pain of his parents' deaths, and what the Dursleys had done to him. He envisioned that pain pouring out of him, forming a snake whose task was to defend him and Draco. Not just from the flames, not just from the extra pain that Nihil was inflicting on him, but from _anything _that Nihil might bring into being and heap on his head. Could he make a defense like that? Well, Portillo Lopez had said that his magic wasn't quite necromancy, but was still on the same spectrum as Nihil's, and vital to fighting him. Harry was at least going to try and see if he could.

The void beneath him seemed to bulge and ripple. Harry couldn't tell if he was seeing something that was really there, or seeing it with the eyes of his mind, or something else, but the stretching went on, he was certain of that, and then it swirled and coalesced into the head of a huge black snake with jaws wide-spread.

Harry flinched and ducked as it soared up at him, but then he realized it was aiming at Nihil, and that it must have answered his desperate prayer for protection, and felt more than a little foolish.

A hard pressure squeezed him from the side. Harry blinked and turned his head. He had almost forgotten about Portillo Lopez. "What are you doing?" she yelled at him, voice so close to his ear that he could hear it above the roar of the flames and his own screams, which by now were almost involuntary as Nihil scraped and tore at him.

"I summoned something to defend me!" Harry yelled back, and then tried to duck out of the way.

He couldn't do that, he realized a moment later. He was standing on the snake's head, and he thought Portillo Lopez and Raverat were as well, though he couldn't see them in the flame-torn darkness. He just had to do the best he could with standing still and trying to keep his feet clinging to the snake's slick head, and hope that Nihil would be as vulnerable to the snake's teeth, or poison, or whatever it used, as Harry hoped he would be.

The snake snapped its jaws together with a horrible ringing sound. Harry shuddered a little, hearing it. Then it turned its head and fastened those jaws together around Nihil, shaking him hard enough to break more than a few limbs.

But of course Nihil was nothingness, and should slip right out of the teeth, Harry thought. And he had no limbs to break.

Then he heard a sound that heartened him: Nihil had frozen in the snake's grip instead of simply melting away and screamed, as though he _did _have limbs to break. Harry smiled and leaned forwards, hand resting on the edge of the snake's neck as he urged it to greater and harder biting.

Nihil tossed back and forth, and the rain of fire from above stopped. Harry could hear the steady chanting of Portillo Lopez and Raverat now. Whether they were chanting in Latin or another language, or the interruptions in the normal world of sight and sound were just too great, Harry couldn't make out what they were saying.

The snake moved forwards, pulling an immense neck out of nowhere that Harry could see—wherever illusions and magical concepts were before they existed, he reckoned. Nihil moved with it, a flat black smear that seemed stretched out across an unreflecting mirror, clawing and flailing at the snake, screaming in a voice that seemed to rearrange the past to create its sound. Harry leaned forwards, focusing his will on destroying Nihil, commanding the snake to eat as much of the tar as he could.

Nihil cried out, within and without Harry's head, and faded into a tattering banner, blowing, toppling, turning, gone.

Harry gasped and opened his eyes. He stood within the world of void and flame for one moment more, and then they were gone, too, and he was back on the ordinary earth, under stars, with Raverat and Portillo Lopez slowing and then ending their chant beside him.

"What did you do?" Portillo Lopez asked him at once. She had her head cocked on one side like a curious bird, and she looked as though she would peck apart his skull, if necessary, to get the secrets out.

"Only what I thought would help me survive," Harry said. He looked around and heard the stretching and groans and confused sounds as the camp came awake again. He could have sagged with relief, except that that might make him look weak in front of the Aurors. He had half-feared that, even with Nihil driven away, Draco and the rest of them might sleep forever. "I used the snake illusions against him the same way you told me they could be used." He arched his eyebrows at Portillo Lopez. "Was that wrong? Did you want me to only think about the magic, and never use it?"

She sighed. "No." Then she turned to Raverat and said something in that same language they had been using for the chant. Listening, Harry didn't think it was Latin after all. Raverat gave her a sad smile, bowed his head as though he was saluting to something, and then turned and ran away into the darkness.

"Well?" Harry demanded. "You look upset that I used it. Why?"

"Because our efforts weren't working," Portillo Lopez said, turning back towards him. "The chants that I've never known to fail, that always work against necromancers, only failed against him. You were the only one who saved us. And I don't know _why_, and I hate being in a position where I'm so dependent on someone whose magic and whose ways I don't understand."

Harry smiled in spite of himself. "It's good for you to find out how it feels," he said. "That's how I've felt most of the time that I've talked to you, because you wouldn't explain everything and I could never understand the things that you _did _explain."

"But surely you knew that you could trust me?" Portillo Lopez looked at him with narrowed eyes now.

"Not always," Harry said. "Not when I had to think that everyone could be a servant of Nihil, and not when I thought that the mark on your back might mean that you were sworn to him, and not when you seemed to oppose me and Draco most of the time."

"I was only trying to make sure that you didn't get yourselves killed," Portillo Lopez said in a soft, injured tone, turning away.

Harry shook his head in wonder. Who would have known that he could actually _hurt _Portillo Lopez by refusing to trust her as much as she wanted to be trusted?

"Harry?"

Harry turned around. Draco stood in the tent's entrance, scanning the darkness with his magical eye as if that would reveal something to him that his ordinary eye wouldn't. For all Harry knew about its properties, that might be true. He stepped back to Draco and embraced him, kissing him hard enough to make him sway in place. He felt Draco's arm, his hand holding his wand, rise and curve around his back, holding him in place.

"Something did happen, didn't it?" Draco said into his ear. "What?"

"Nihil attacked through your sleep, and kept you and most of the rest of the camp asleep," Harry began, hoping that Draco wouldn't think he had taken an unacceptable risk by going out to fight. At least he could call on Portillo Lopez and Raverat to point out that he hadn't gone by himself, that they had helped.

Except that, when he looked around, Portillo Lopez had gone. Harry rolled his eyes and settled down to the explanation that he knew would probably only partially satisfy Draco.

* * *

Draco leaned back in his chair and concentrated deeply for a moment, both eyes closed. When he opened them, he focused all his attention to his magical eye, the same way he had been learning to do with the ordinary one before he received a replacement for the missing one. He focused so hard that the sight to one side blurred, and all he could see before him was the bed where Harry slept, given permission to miss today's classes once Holder and Robards had received a full account of what had happened.

The wild magic he had seen before in Harry was there again today, but less wild than before, subdued to a shimmering cloak of colors along Harry's back and shoulders. Draco nodded slowly. His theory that the magic responded to an individual's personality, and their energy, was looking more and more like it was right.

It proved that he could understand some of the information that the magical eye conveyed to him. What he _didn't _understand was why he had stayed asleep last night. He had made a sacrifice for Nihil; his mind and body bore Nihil's touch. He reached up and scratched the scars that stretched across his face.

Why hadn't he awakened in the same way that Harry had? Was it because his magic wasn't touched, the way Harry's certainly was? But that wasn't enough for Draco. He didn't like Harry risking his life on his own, and he hated the thought that Nihil could keep him helpless while he launched an attack. That meant Draco had to solve the puzzle for the sake of his pride as well as because of the fact that Nihil would probably attack again the moment he could.

_And what factors govern his readiness? _Draco leaned his head back and groaned aloud. So much they didn't understand, and they had so little time to employ what they did. Nihil might release those balls of nothingness soon and consume the world, or the balance between life and death might shift further.

"I found it."

Draco looked instinctively at the figure on the bed, but no, it wasn't Harry who had spoken. He turned and looked at the tent flap and saw Ventus standing there, holding a flat wooden box in her hands.

"I found it," she repeated as she came towards him, and Draco saw magic leaping and swirling around the box. He had to grip the back of his chair to keep from being overwhelmed by it, in fact. It was wild magic like the kind that he had seen around Harry, but all one color—gold—rather than the medley of shifting shades that Harry displayed. And towards the outer edges, it swirled and blazed in neat rings like the ones that Draco had seen on Portillo Lopez's wrists. And in the very center, above what also looked to be the center of the box, was an expanding yellow glow, the opposite of the hole in the center of Nemo's aura.

"What is that?" he whispered.

"Something I found," Ventus, who seemed to like saying the obvious today, responded. She put the box down on the ground in front of him and looked at it complacently. "I should have thought of it before. When Harry said that we needed something that could defeat Nihil, I realized that I knew what would."

Draco shook his head. "That's impossible. We've been looking for solutions. And you're loyal to me. You would have said something before now, if you really knew the answer."

Ventus gave him a look of mild impatience. "Weren't you listening to me? I _knew _it, but I wasn't _thinking _about it. I had to think about it again, and consider it, before I knew that I could find it. And then I had to find it." She looked back at the box with a slightly smug expression. "There it was. Anyone could have found it, if they'd looked for it and knew the correct spells to discover it in the first place."

Draco stood up. The magic around the box hadn't faded the way he had thought it might when his eye grew used to it. It wasn't just an effect that resulted from the place where Ventus had stolen it, then. The thing in the box itself was inherently magical.

"I want you to tell me what you did," he said, in a calm, careful voice that he hoped he could prevent from breaking into a shout, "and I want you to go and put it back in the Ministry the minute you're done, if it's an artifact that you stole from them." For many reasons, it would be better if Holder could be flattered and coaxed into believing that she'd found the box herself.

"I didn't _steal _it," Ventus said. "Unless you can steal the leaves from a tree, or the light from the sun."

"This doesn't get us any closer to the answer," Draco reminded her. "What _is _that?"

"Which part do you want first?" Ventus looked at him with curiosity that would have been insolence in anyone else, even Harry. "What I did to find it, or what it is? Because you've asked for both, and with that tone that says I should do both of them first, which is impossible, you see. Except if you use a Stasis Spell to slow your enemy down," she added, brightening, "and _then_—"

"Tell me what you did," Draco said, and he didn't grind his teeth, but he did stare at the purple magic that corkscrewed lazily around Ventus and wonder if there was a way of freezing it in place, and her chatter with it.

Ventus bobbed her head, apparently happy enough to do that. "I started thinking that some War Wizard spells were based on the concepts of other worlds interwoven with ours—things like the world of dreams, the world of death, and so on. I thought that the world of life was one of them. The world of _reality_." She gave Draco a significant look of the kind that would have made her a terrible conspirator.

Draco hardly cared, though. His mind had been thrown by her words, and he had to step carefully away from her and then reach out for a chair before he collapsed.

"Yes," Ventus said, and smiled at him. "The reality that we need for enfolding Nihil's balls of nothingness, according to that vision you saw in the mirror. And that Harry saw, too," she added, casting a glance at his sleeping figure on the bed, as if she wondered why he wasn't awake. "So I used one of my father's spells to enter the world of reality. It took a while to find a piece that would break off, but I did. And I brought it back in this box, because the spellbooks said I should. It needs a limited container to hold it at first, or else it'll simply leak out into the world around it and make that world more real."

"What was that place like?" Draco asked. He didn't know that this was important information, which partially made him scold himself for asking it, but he was fascinated enough that he couldn't stop.

Ventus's face grew distant for a moment. "Like walking through a golden forest suspended in a golden sea," she said. "Creatures went past me, but I don't think they were solid in the way that creatures in our world are. They were imaginings, you know? Thoughts about what kind of creatures could have existed, rather than actual ones. That world is about possibility and potential. It's more real than ours, but it's not more fixed. It moves around instead. Fluid. Without a destiny yet. _Unborn_," she concluded, sounding as though she'd produced that word with triumph from the very bottom of her mind.

Draco looked back at the wooden box. Without the glow—which of course no one would be able to see without his magical eye—it was an ordinary enough container. He only hoped that it would be a long time before Nihil learned of what Ventus had done. They could use all the days they had to make the reality into a weapon.

"Can I see it?" he asked.

"It's dangerous for the box to be open too long, until some time has passed and the piece of reality has started thinking that this is all there is to the world," Ventus said, but she reached down and pushed back the lid.

All Draco could see was a glow of gold, with a thicker spot in the middle where, he thought, the yellow blossom that complemented the hole in the center of Nemo came from. When he squinted, or covered his ordinary eye, the thicker spot became an even thicker swirl of what looked like brownish-yellow syrup, attended by fluffy clouds like scrambled eggs.

Not the best visual for life and reality, Draco had to admit, but perhaps the best one for the ideas that Ventus had told him its world embodied: potential, life, imagination. That syrup and those bits of eggs could form into, or hatch, anything.

"Wow," he said softly, and then blinked and realized that Ventus had shut the box again. What he was looking at resembled afterimages more than anything else. He shut his eyes for a moment and waited for his brain and sight to readjust.

"Draco? Ventus? What is it?"

Harry was sitting up. Ventus launched proudly into her explanation once again, while Draco stood there and thought.

They had to use this discovery. There was no question about that. But it didn't seem as if the bits of reality or life—Draco didn't know what the more accurate term for them would be—would be as easily manipulated as the bit of the void that they had made into a weapon. And they didn't need weapons, did they? They needed containers. Boxes.

There were books in the Manor that might help, he thought. Or perhaps even in the Black library that Harry had at Number Twelve Grimmauld Place. He knew that he had read one ancestor's diary once, just a few pages, that covered such ideas; the ancestor had been a thaumosculptor, working raw magic into delicate and pretty shapes for the delectation of wealthy collectors. He must have been asked to do a box at least once, Draco thought, or an idea that they could adapt for a box.

He smiled, and became aware that Harry was looking at him with an approving glance. Draco smiled back and began to pace the tent, mind whirling and spinning, awash with new information.

* * *

It was worth something, to see Draco look full of himself again. Harry hadn't realized how much he missed it.

Draco had seemed downcast after Harry had explained what he'd done to combat Nihil, and hadn't changed his mind or his expression even when Harry mentioned that no one else in the campsite had been awake. Harry had feared the same thing would happen when he understood that Ventus had found this piece of reality and not Draco. But it appeared that, since he hadn't had a suspicion that such a thing was possible, no more than Harry had, Draco would make up for any disappointment by putting it to use with his mind.

Draco wouldn't always be the kindest or the most considerate lover. But Harry preferred him as he was to how he could be.

He looked down at the spinning piece of reality as Draco apparently had already done and made polite, admiring noises. Ventus continued to look pleased with herself, and explained the spell and where she had found it when Harry asked. To Harry's thinking, it sounded like a dangerous spell, the kind of thing Draco would have been upset by if he'd gone off and done it by himself, but Ventus talked as if this was an ordinary, everyday chore for her.

And then an idea came crashing home to Harry. He blinked and tried to chase it away. If he suggested it, it would be intruding on Draco's territory, in some ways. Draco obviously wanted to be the one who thought of the next part of the solution, and Harry didn't want bad feelings between them.

Then again, Draco wanted to defeat Nihil. And there was no reason to think that Harry's single, unsophisticated idea would work. He might as well go ahead and voice it, so that other people could change it and complicate it.

"What do you think would happen if we tore off bits of the reality—can you do that?" he broke off to ask Ventus.

"I don't know," Ventus said, her eyes brightening. "I could find out."

Harry smiled at her, noting in the back of his mind that he no longer doubted her when she made a declaration like that. "Do. I was thinking of concealing some reality in my snake illusions, and using them as the containers to hold Nihil's balls of nothingness."

Silence from Draco's direction. Harry hesitated before he turned and looked towards him.

But Draco was watching him with quiet, ungrudging approval. Harry smiled back in relief. _When it's necessary, he can put the good of the people around him above pride. _

Then a thought occurred to him that made him want to roll his eyes. _And it probably helps that I'm his boyfriend, so some of the glory reflects on him._

He still wouldn't change Draco for anyone else, though.


	34. Chewing Holes in Reality

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Thirty-Four—Chewing Holes in Reality_

"I do not see how this can possibly work."

Portillo Lopez's voice was doubtful, but Harry had learned to listen for the tones of her doubt. She sounded intrigued, rather than turning away at once from an idea that she thought was impossible, and so Harry smiled at her and did his best to lean forwards and make his voice persuasive.

"Well, I don't know that it's the best idea. But you said that my magic is on the same spectrum as Nihil's, and it seemed deadly to him when he attacked the camp the other night. It might be able to contain the things of his creation, too."

"Making a container is not the same thing as making a weapon." Portillo Lopez gave him a quick glance before she turned back to studying the wooden box that contained the piece of reality Ventus had brought back. "The theory is substantially different."

"And let me guess, you don't know the theory of making a container as well," Draco drawled from the side. He was lounging in a chair in Portillo Lopez's tent that Harry thought she had been sitting in before they arrived, and he hadn't changed his position since he sat down. When Harry had looked at him, though, he saw Draco's magical eye narrowed on both Portillo Lopez and the box, and thought he was doing his own work with it even as they sat there. "Because you use your marks and your voices and the vows of your Order against necromancers in that way."

Portillo Lopez paused, head again moving in that bird-like tilt Harry had seen when she questioned him after Nihil's attack. Then she nodded. "You are very clever for having figured out that theory," she said. "Alas that we have already admitted the Order's existence and helped you."

"Alas?" Draco frowned. Harry let his hand drift down casually to his wand. There were still some things about Portillo Lopez that he didn't trust.

"If we had not, then we could have pressed you into the Order for finding out a secret about it, and you would have been a fine addition to our ranks," Portillo Lopez said simply, and then went back to studying the box.

Draco looked uneasy. Meanwhile, a slight smile tugged the side of Portillo Lopez's mouth up. Harry suspected that she had means of getting her own back when she felt threatened by someone outside the Order.

"I could at least try," Harry went on saying. "What if I called a snake illusion right now, and we saw whether we could infuse it with the reality that Ventus took?"

Portillo Lopez studied him much the same way she had been looking at the concealed piece of reality. "Why should we waste it? The theory must be tested first. If this does not work, we shall have wasted a small portion of a precious commodity, and we do not yet know what effects it could have on our world."

"Ventus said that it would just make it more real," Harry muttered, but he knew a refusal when he heard one. He also wasn't sure that he would understand when Portillo Lopez explained the theory, because all her explanations had gone over his head so far. He sighed and sat down, dropping his head between his arms.

"We will learn," said Portillo Lopez. She cast some sort of spell on the wooden box, but since she didn't speak the incantation aloud, Harry wasn't sure what it was. It appeared to do nothing, but Portillo Lopez nodded with that judicious calmness he hated. "I have a theory already. I need Leonard to help me conduct the test, but we will learn."

"How long do we have?" Draco asked, apparently having overcome the stunned silence into which Portillo Lopez had cast him. "Nihil will be moving soon. We can't take so long to make the weapon—container," he amended, when Portillo Lopez gave him a mild impatient look, "that we lose out on the chance to defeat him."

"When we have a theory," Portillo Lopez said, "then we will know what to do."

Draco sneered. Harry winced and sat back, because he knew what was coming next. Since Portillo Lopez never glanced away from the box, she missed any chance she might have had to receive clues from Draco and anticipate him.

"You don't know what you're doing yet," Draco said softly. "We'll waste time and perhaps reality proving your theories, and in the end, we'll still have none and Nihil will be closing his darkness around the world. It's only his obsession with the balls of nothingness and his wariness about destroying Harry and me that have held him back so far."

Portillo Lopez turned and really looked at him for the first time. But she still shook her head, then paused to tuck the scarf she wore around her hair more carefully back into place as it was dislodged.

"I think you are wrong. Yes, our timeline is shortened. But Nihil is not a true necromancer, which is why our spells did not work against him. He is not human. His obsessions are pain and the void. He wants the balls of nothingness to—exist—" Portillo Lopez frowned as if such an inadequate word was painful to her—"more than anything else right now. You are right about that. But you are wrong if you think that you and Trainee Potter have held him back alone. There are other factors, most of which we cannot even guess at, and I will not move too fast and lose our best chance because you are worried."

Silence. Draco stared at her. Portillo Lopez looked back, and seemed deeply unimpressed when Draco's stare turned into a frown. In fact, she had started to turn back to the box when Draco's words arrested her once more.

"Who's come up with most of the ideas and most of the weapons in this war?" Draco demanded, his hand curling around the arm of the chair. "Who's fought Nihil more and harder than anyone else? Who did he target first, before we knew what or who he was? He was mentoring me through his Dearborn skin, and he let us discover that first sign that he left in the trainee barracks. That sounds to me like he thinks that we're his greatest enemies, and he'll come after us first."

"He mentored you through his Dearborn skin, yes," Portillo Lopez said. "And he was angry and afraid when you discovered the truth about his origin. But you spread that knowledge to other people before he could destroy you. And he is Dearborn no longer. He has shed the most human parts of him, and you destroyed Nusquam, who was arguably the second most human. He never invested as much of himself in Nemo, as can be seen by his making no move to reclaim him yet. I do not believe that we can predict him, not truly. You stand the chance of predicting the wrong moves and setting yourself too high in his sights if you think that you and Trainee Potter are of such importance to him."

Draco stayed silent this time, frowning fiercely. Harry knew that he was trying to find holes in Portillo Lopez's words, and he'd probably go on trying for longer than it was worth. His pride was roused up now, and he wanted to prove that he and Harry really were as important as he thought they were.

Harry coughed and leaned forwards again, catching Portillo Lopez's eye. "If he's that inhuman, then why do you think that we have a chance to fight him at all?"

Portillo Lopez launched at once into an explanation Harry had thought she might have prepared, but from her abstracted expression, he didn't think so. It was just the way she was. Theory would always be more attractive to her than practice. "Nihil still exists in the worlds of life and death, of the void and time. He is enfolded in them, and to find a way to escape from them is what he wants. He can be predicted by the same methods that one would use to predict a storm. Simply not by the methods that one would use to predict a human."

Draco jumped in suddenly. "That's one reason why you had Raverat come here, isn't it? Because he's trained as a Seer."

Portillo Lopez gave Draco a look of mild surprise. "Of course. I wondered when you would notice."

Harry could hear Draco grinding his teeth from this distance, and he tried to think of something he could say to turn the conversation before Draco grew more offended. But, to Harry's surprise, Draco only nodded in the end and said, "But he admitted that he's never managed a true vision of the future in the way that Seers do. That makes me wonder what you think he can do against Nihil."

"There are other things to See, and we need all the weapons we can get," Portillo Lopez said simply, and went back to studying the box.

Draco looked at Harry for some reason. Harry immediately tried to seem innocent. He didn't want to become the pawn in a battle between Draco and Portillo Lopez.

But Draco didn't voice a loud question or attack Portillo Lopez's last statement. He leaned back in his chair instead, hands flexing open and magical eye focusing on the box as if it held the answers to all their questions.

_In a way, _Harry thought, looking back at it, too, _it does._

* * *

The thought of the theory they needed to understand and predict Nihil's actions haunted Draco during his classes, while he was sleeping, and while he was training himself to understand and use the data that his magical eye provided. It would have haunted him when he made love to Harry, too, but he was occupied with something rather more pleasant then.

There was a way to predict Nihil's actions, perhaps, but Portillo Lopez wouldn't tell him what it was. It probably related to the vows of her Order, Draco thought, or she would have had no reason to conceal it; he thought they were firm enough allies for that now.

And they needed to ensure that Nihil couldn't come back to life, although he had managed to resurrect himself from every death so far. And they needed to find something to do with the reality Ventus had brought back, come up with containers for it, or sculpt it, somehow. Draco decided that it would be worth going to the Manor library and fetching his ancestor's diaries after all.

He went to Holder and Robards to ask for their permission to leave the camp and found them bent over a desk, discussing something in low, serious voices. They stopped and glared at him the moment he entered the tent, and Draco decided that that would stop at once. If they were true allies, then they should be able to tell him what they were doing.

"Well?" he asked, as he stepped into the tent and drew the flap shut behind him. "Have you heard something that we should know?"

Holder and Robards exchanged intense glances, and then he nodded and leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes as if weary of it all. Draco privately sneered at him. Robards almost never interacted with him, Harry, or the rest of the comitatus. He left that up to Holder, as if he were too superior to do so. Draco suspected that they got more respect from her than they would have from Robards, though, so perhaps it was for the best.

"Nihil has begun to move," Holder said. "Reports, so far confused and frightened, of a large spot of nothingness expanding in the Muggle world, in the middle of London. They don't know what it is or how to stop it. Whatever touches it vanishes. Becomes nonexistent."

"I could have told them that," Draco muttered, but his skin was prickling and his mind leaping wildly. Now they _had _to come up with a solution, and no amount of theory or Portillo Lopez's need to keep secrets could be allowed to stand in the way.

"Could you have?" Holder was watching him with a distant expression in her eyes, and Draco recognized the one she wore when she was about to lash out at someone, for no better reason than their being there.

Draco sneered at her. "I didn't know this was going to happen exactly when and where it did. But I know what the balls of nothingness do, and I know that we should have moved before now instead of dawdling about. What is the Ministry doing to help the Muggles?"

"They've sent the War Wizards." Robards spoke suddenly, opening his eyes and considering Draco as if he thought that he had become interesting or potentially smart. "With the Obliviators. The War Wizards believe that they can contain the nothingness for a short time."

"For a short time?" Draco asked softly. "And what happens when they can't do that anymore?"

Robards and Holder both looked grim, but kept silent.

"We have to do something," Draco said. "We have to use the weapons that we know we have, Harry's snake illusions and the reality that Ventus managed to bring back. We don't have time to stand about pondering and deliberating anymore." He could feel his heartbeat shaking his body. He didn't care. He was too involved in the sensation of finally, _finally _doing something to care.

"I think you have been overly influenced by your partner, Trainee Malfoy." Holder leaned forwards. "What makes you think that springing into motion with no plan is a good idea? Particularly when you would be in the way of the War Wizards?'

Draco took a deep breath. No one else could see inside his head, he reminded himself. They didn't understand the racing connections that made his plans sound workable rather than simply crazy to him.

"You don't expect the War Wizards to succeed," he said. "But they're on the spot. Why not send them into the world of life and have them return with some reality that they can pack around the ball of nothingness until we can arrive?"

"And reveal the existence of potentially our best weapon before we are ready?" Holder shook her head. "Also unadvisable."

Draco closed his eyes and stood still for a moment, his heart still beating so furiously it made him want to run or fall over or throw up. He needed to consult with the comitatus, he thought. He could use Granger's calm expertise, Ventus's knowledge of War Wizard spells, and the boundless enthusiasm for the thought of doing something that Harry would bring along.

"Are you going to stop the comitatus from going there to rescue the Muggles?" he asked, opening his eyes and looking back and forth between Holder and Robards.

"What an interesting question." Holder stared at him with narrowed eyes. "Why would you want to go there, Malfoy, you who hate Muggles and have been touched more deeply by Nihil than the rest?" She looked at his magical eye and then away.

"Because I live in the world that Nihil wants to eat, too," Draco said. "Now, answer the question."

"If you interfere with the War Wizards, then we will," said Robards, and he went back to his intense, soft conversation with Holder as if Draco had left already.

Draco didn't need to hear anything else. He whirled and ran towards his own tent, so swiftly that the dark red rings of controlled magic that surrounded Robards's body traveled with him as afterimages.

They _would _find and stop this. Nihil had done something at last, and Draco couldn't wait to oppose him.

* * *

Harry had been uneasy all day.

It had started as an ache behind his eyes when he woke up, not specifically a headache but haunting the sockets and the lashes and the brows. He kept rubbing at his eyes, which did no good and made Hermione offer to cast a spell that would soothe the invasion of little biting insects she thought he must be experiencing. Luckily, that pain had gone away about mid-morning, and Harry soon couldn't remember how it had felt.

Then there was the sensation of the world spinning and sliding away beneath him. He was dodging through one of Ketchum's obstacle courses when the obstacles went mad around him, the stones seeming to drift above the ground, which itself tilted and ran downhill like a river. Harry staggered and fell, and Draco, chasing him, had fallen over him and then given him a curious glance.

That sensation ended, but now there was a loud, noiseless thrumming in his bones, so like the sensation the night Nihil had attacked that Harry kept watching for him. But everyone else remained awake, and Portillo Lopez and Raverat didn't come pounding through the camp to find him, so Harry thought it must mean something else.

It was almost a relief when Draco _did _come running up, with the news that the nothingness was spreading in London and the War Wizards had gone to combat it.

"We're going, of course," he said, before Harry could say anything. "As soon as we get the rest of the comitatus together and decide if anyone can offer any suggestions beyond the obvious before we act."

Harry nodded in relief and sent a Patronus to Hermione, while Draco went to fetch Ventus and Herricks, whom he had briefly seen on his run here. Harry stayed behind in case anyone important came to the tent while Draco was gone. When he received Hermione's Patronus in turn, promising to come in a few minutes but saying nothing about Ron, he sent one to Ron, too.

Ron actually got there before Draco did, his eyes wide and his face so pale that he looked like he might faint. "This is really it, huh, mate?" he muttered, sticking his hands in his pockets and looking around helplessly.

"Yeah." Harry gave him a tentative smile. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah," Ron said back. "Just thinking about the battle in Wiltshire, and the way that we couldn't do that much. You and Ventus were the only ones who did anything that hurt him. What if it's like that again?"

"We're not going to oppose Nihil this time unless we have to," Harry said firmly. "All we have to do is figure out a way to stop the nothingness from spreading."

Ron frowned. "And that will show Nihil what we can do, won't it? Then he can decide to do something else with the balls of nothingness, something that would get rid of or get around the precautions that we've established. What if this is a test, rather than a serious attack on the Muggles?"

Harry paused for a moment, stricken. He hadn't thought of that, and he should have. Nihil wasn't stupid, despite the way that he sometimes seemed to attack without forethought and focus too much attention on Harry and Draco. He could be waiting and watching to see how they would respond, so that he could come up with an answer to their reality-containers at his leisure.

But in the end, Harry had to shake his head and say, "Even if that's the case, Ron, our response has to be the same. Because he's trying to destroy people with an expanding pool of nothingness that will go on expanding if someone doesn't stop it. Stay away, and this could become the real thing instead of a test."

To his surprise, Ron's color returned, and he gave Harry a nod and a smile. "Yeah. Reckoned that might be the case."

Harry was still wondering why Ron would take reassurance from him so much better than from Draco when Draco returned, Ventus and Herricks in tow. Behind him was Hermione, panting loudly from running across the camp and clutching an enormous book against her chest.

"Raverat lent me this," she said, when Harry looked curiously at the book. "He'd said I should study it, and there's something in here that _might _be useful against Nihil. I don't know for certain, though."

Harry shook his head, wondering if they would actually have time to look things up, but Draco was talking by then, and he had to pay attention.

"We're going to London," Draco said, his eyes so brilliant that even Herricks lost that look of stoppered sullenness he had worn around Draco since Draco won their duel. "We'll get the Apparition coordinates from the War Wizards. They're there already, but there must be some who are left in the camp. Ventus?"

Ventus blinked a little, as if she didn't understand the question. "I don't know the Apparition coordinates off the top of my head, if that's what you're asking."

Draco clenched his teeth down, but kept his voice calm. He had done remarkably well with that lately, Harry thought, resorting to calmness instead of immediate violence when a member of the comitatus pissed him off. "I appreciate that. I was asking if there were really War Wizards left in the camp, and if you would have any trouble learning the coordinates from them if there were."

"Oh." Ventus paused, staring at the tent wall the way Harry had seen her look politely at Ketchum as he tried to teach her defensive maneuvers. "Yes, I think I can. And there are always some left to secure any base camp, in case they have to bring wounded back."

"Good," Draco said. "Go fetch them."

Ventus's face was bright with joy as she obeyed. Harry admired that, too. There was nothing she liked more than to be doing something, and so Draco was employing her exactly the right way.

"Granger." Draco turned to Hermione so fast that Harry saw her blink apprehensively. "Do you think you could use those Seer talents to predict whether or not Nihil is coming to the fight himself?"

"Er, no," Hermione said, turning a bit pink. She held up Raverat's book again. "But Raverat said this can help. I can try to read through it and find something that will tell me about Nihil, or—or about ways that I could use my Seer talents."

Harry grinned to himself. He thought that was the first time he had _ever _heard Hermione stammer in any high-pressure situation. Well, she was probably trying to figure out what immediate good her skills could do, and she didn't have the protection of Ventus's calm and polished demeanor.

"Good," Draco said, and whirled around to face Ron. "I want you to use those strategizing skills of yours when we get there, Weasley. Figure out the best way to approach the nothingness and keep out of the way of the War Wizards and those running, screaming Muggles that we'll probably also encounter."

Ron stared at him. "What strategizing skills?" he asked, and his face had turned red to match the pink of Hermione's. "You've never let me do any of the planning when we've gone into battle before!"

"I didn't trust you enough before," Draco said, and his tone of voice said that he wasn't going to offer an apology for that, although Harry could see Ron opening his mouth to demand one. "But everyone tells me that you're good at chess, and I know that you pay attention in Ketchum's class better than most of us. That's what I want you to do."

Ron straightened his back and shot Draco a disgusted look. "Yes, _sir_," he said, voice dripping with sarcasm. But Harry knew that he would do his best, if only to spite Draco, and that was enough for Draco, who nodded and turned to Herricks.

"You're to hold yourself ready for any eventuality," he said. "Come to the aid of anyone who looks like he needs it."

Herricks might have objected, too, but Harry thought the memory of what had happened when he challenged Draco for leadership of the comitatus was too strong. He nodded in silence instead, and that left Draco free to turn to Harry.

"You feel it, don't you?" Draco asked.

Harry touched his collarbone, which throbbed especially hard with the sensations traveling through him, and nodded.

"Hmmm." Draco tapped his finger against his lips for a moment, and then clenched his hand down on air and smiled. "We'll be together at the forefront, you and I, and use our magic as we see fit."

"How?" Herricks demanded. "I thought Potter was the one who managed to defend the camp the other night, not you."

"Yes," Draco said, not even growing angry. "But I was asleep then, and didn't feel it coming. This time, I do, _here_." His finger skimmed the scar that Nihil had given him.

Herricks fell silent, looking nonplused, and Ventus came back with the Apparition coordinates, and they all had other things to think about.


	35. Racing to the Rescue

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Thirty-Five—Racing to the Rescue_

As they came out of the Apparition, Draco looked around. He expected to hear screaming from the Muggles, and the snap and roar of spells from the direction of the War Wizards. The coordinates Ventus had got them had been precise, so Draco thought they couldn't have arrived too far away from the scene of the battle.

Instead, they stood in the middle of silence. Silence lapped and flowed over them in great waves, and the air on his scars felt almost cool. Draco would have found it reassuring, if not for the burn _under _his scars, which told him that Nihil, or Nihil's living dead, was not far away.

And if not for the magic that his eye detected almost at once, heaving in a colorless cloud over the streets.

Draco winced when he looked at that cloud. He would almost have felt better if he couldn't have seen it at all. It was the same sight-dissolving yellow color Nihil used for some of his glamours. And it extended tendrils in all directions, touching two crumbled buildings around them and another burning one. Draco couldn't make out what it was doing to them, but he knew it would eventually lead to their destruction.

In the center of the street, rapidly expanding, was the ball of nothingness.

Well. Not _ball_, not now. It had grown to the size of a globe, perhaps as big as two or three large men, and Draco saw the edge extend further as he watched. He had to look away from it, clapping one hand defensively to his watering eye. It was even worse trying to look at that than it was at the color of Nihil's magic.

The War Wizards were nowhere in sight. Draco smiled grimly. It seemed that his promise to Holder and Robards to stay out of their way would be easy to keep.

"Spread out," he told the rest of the comitatus. "Can all of you see the edge of the ball of nothingness? Avoid it as much as you can. We know what will happen if it touches you." That probably explained the absence of Muggle buildings, he thought, and perhaps even the War Wizards. If they had come too close, or fallen at the feet of the ball, there was nothing to prevent it from swallowing them.

"We need to contain it." That was Herricks, his wide eyes fixed on the ball with such terror that Draco was surprised his voice sounded calm.

"Of course we do," Draco said, and allowed some of his real scorn through so that Herricks would hear him and snap out of the fear consuming him. Sure enough, Herricks turned around and glared. Draco smiled in some contentment. Occasionally, it was good to have a rivalry with someone that he commanded. "And our best strategy for it is still—" He turned to Harry.

Harry started to reply, but Weasley interrupted. "You brought me along to strategize, Malfoy, didn't you?" he asked, his eyes narrowed on the ball in front of them as if it were the only thing that existed in the world. Draco hadn't seen him stand like that before, without paying attention to Granger in the form of constant little glances to the side.

"Yes," Draco said, holding back his impatience with a slight effort. If Weasley had something to say about the situation, then he would listen, although he thought, from the flush on Harry's face and the way his hand edged towards his wand, that he knew perfectly well what had to happen.

_Weasley probably does, too. But he likes to show that he matters._

"Then listen to me," Weasley said, and swept his hand towards the edge of the ball of nothingness. "The War Wizards aren't visible for a reason. I can't believe that something stationary just ate them. They would have known better than to keep hammering it with spells once they saw that that tactic wouldn't work."

Ventus lifted her head like a warhorse hearing the battle-trumpet, her eyes bright. "He's right," she said, when Draco glanced at her. "They would realize that they probably knew a spell that would contain it, but not one of the ones they first tried."

"Are you going to listen to me or her?" Weasley interrupted, before Draco could show that he understood.

Draco gave Weasley a long, cool glance, until he winced and turned aside as if he were trying to conceal his uneasiness. Draco nodded, a short nod that he hoped Weasley would take the right way. Yes, Draco would listen to him, but he saw no reason why Weasley had to make a bid like that, to take over from Draco and trample on Ventus's words of wisdom. While Weasley might know the situation, Ventus knew the War Wizards.

"Both," Draco said. "I'm going to listen to everybody who might help us survive this." He glanced at Granger to see if she had anything to add, but she was staring at the buildings around them and biting her lip. Draco swept them with one glance to see if there was anything magical in them, but recognized nothing, so he reckoned it was Granger's innate connections to Muggles that were making her suspicious—or nostalgic, or whatever the reason really was that she was doing that. "So what do you suggest that we do, Weasley?"

"Get out of sight," Weasley said. "Hide, try to join with the War Wizards, and wait for something to happen."

Draco turned back to the ball of nothingness before he answered, and saw that it had grown bigger. He shook his head. "We need to contain it," he said. "Before it eats London, and the Muggles, and us all. I don't know how far it can spread, but that might not matter. Nihil will try to join it up with other balls, of course."

"_Now_, Malfoy!"

Draco blinked at the panicked note in Weasley's voice, and then saw a boil of colors, bleak and horrid, in the air with his magical eye. The ball of nothingness was shooting a tendril towards them.

Draco dived, wrapping his arms around Harry without thought and rolling them towards one of the buildings that lay half-destroyed on the ground. His mind clattered uselessly inside his head, telling him that it was no use, that of course he was going to die and this was going to fail, because the ball of nothingness could destroy anything it touched, so what was the use of hiding? They could only get out of the way, and if the ball of nothingness could actually see or sense them—as Draco was beginning to think it could, thanks to that cloud of magic if nothing else—then it would only follow their movements.

But when he looked up, it was to see the tendril slamming past overhead, and that everyone else had had the same idea he did: Weasley lay nearby with his arms securely wrapped around Granger and her book, and Herricks had tackled Ventus. Ventus looked more annoyed than anyone else did, and was struggling to get up, her wand aimed at the dark corridor that the nothingness had carved through the air.

"I can destroy it," she said. "Let me go into that other world and get some more of the reality—"

"You were right, Weasley," said Draco, and then turned to Harry. "I want you to call up a snake illusion and use it to contain some of the reality we brought along." The wooden box still rested in Ventus's pocket, and Draco didn't think any had been spilled, or she would have been surrounded by a golden glow. "_Now_."

* * *

Harry wanted to protest that he didn't know how to form a snake illusion for the purpose of containing reality. It wasn't as though anyone had ever done this before, had they? And he had counted on at least having some War Wizards around him who could teach him spells that might modify or strengthen his snake illusion.

But he knew what Draco meant. They couldn't wait until the nothingness devoured the Muggles and the world around them, wringing their hands because they didn't understand it. They would have to take some risks.

Harry began to grin when he thought about it that way. _I can do that. I can do that more than happily._

He reached up and closed his eyes, envisioning his purpose, the nothingness contained and wrapped in reality, more than any specific snake. That was the way he had always done it. He hadn't called on a cobra with a spread hood to protect him from Nihil's rain of fire the other night; he had just thought about being safe, and the cobra had come along.

His fingers tingled and grew cool. Harry opened his eyes and then stared when he saw the slender silver body that extended away from his hand. It looked a little like the snakes that had bitten into the side of the void to hold him up when Nihil was attacking, but it had glittering blue patterns on its back that Harry certainly hadn't seen or imagined before.

The snake turned back towards him once, its tongue flickering out from between pale jaws that rather resembled, Harry thought before he could stop himself, the way Voldemort's mouth had looked. Then it turned away and surged straight towards Ventus, who was arguing with Herricks.

"I can fight," Harry heard her saying. "We don't _know _that we can't defeat Nihil, and even if we can't that's no reason to sit about—"

The snake went on extending, and latched its teeth into the box in her pocket. Harry grunted. He could feel the impression when it struck, as if he'd thrown a rope with a hook on it and caught the hook over the top of a wall. The line between them grew taut, the snake's body thrumming, and Harry thought he picked up an echo of the throbbing that ran through his collarbone.

_That's it, _he thought in some amazement, as the snake bit down and steadied, and the reality began to leak into it. _I felt the throbbing in the first place because of the imbalance between life and death. I'm feeling it from the box because the extra reality has its own presence in the world, and makes the balance start to shift back again._

The snake reared its head from the box, fangs shining. Ventus had fallen silent and was watching it with wide, curious eyes. Herricks stood there, too, frozen, but when he caught Harry's gaze, he gave a nervous sort of bow, as though he assumed Harry was a god who needed to be obeyed.

Harry sighed in irritation. He hoped that Herricks wouldn't start that nonsense again about how Harry instead of Draco should be the leader of the comitatus.

But those thoughts were unimportant compared to the throbbing that traveled up the snake into his arm. The snake ate the reality, and Harry saw its jaws and then its midsection bulge around it. Draco hissed beside him as though he thought that there was something wrong with the sight. Harry shook his head, hoping that that would reassure him. He was incapable of speaking right now.

Because the snake had eaten the reality, it was, in a way, as if Harry had. He already knew that his connection with this illusion ran deeper than his connection with the others had.

Warmth opened in his belly. He could feel a slow, languid haze creeping into his mind, too. It was odd. He lost his fear of Nihil and his fear of the ball of nothingness and his fear of not being able to do anything at the same moment, for what felt like the first time in months. He was surveying the world from a lazy distance, ready to be interested in anything he wanted, create anything he wanted.

Fight anything he wanted.

He looked up at the ball of nothingness, at the corridor of dark above them and the steadily expanding globe that looked as though it would land on them soon. He could see it moving, now, where he hadn't before, creeping across the ground like a cloud across the sun. Harry gave a lazy smile and shifted so that he was aiming the snake and his arm both up at the edge of the ball.

He wouldn't permit this. He was going to contain it, and eat it, and surround it with enough glittering reality that it would dissolve.

He reached out, or he lay there and the snake reached out for him. It was hard to tell the difference between them anymore. The warmth continued to stir through him, and he had the strong impression that he could stamp his feet and birth a new universe, if he wanted to. The muttering people around him might not believe it; Draco had a doubtful expression on his face that made Harry want to roll his eyes. And Ventus was staring at him, and Herricks looked terrified.

They only looked that way because they couldn't feel what he did, Harry thought. Unfortunately, he could think of no other way of showing them what he felt than by consuming the edge of the globe of nothingness.

And perhaps the whole thing.

The snake reeled out from him, streaming across the sky like a silver banner. Its fangs closed on the edge of the blackness, and it shook its head hard enough that shimmers ran up Harry's arm. His body ached, and he spat out something from his mouth that writhed briefly on the ground.

Well, if he could feel the pleasure and the warmth from eating reality through the snake, he reckoned it was only fair that he feel the disgusting taste of the poison it was swallowing and containing, too.

The snake rose higher and higher, jaws parting and jutting forwards, as though it was drawing more substance from his magic, or his soul, or wherever it grew from, to become stronger. Harry didn't mind. He continued to feel as though he could give of himself to whatever needed it. Bring Draco's father back to life? Yes, he could do that. Bring the world peace from all wars? He could do that if he wanted to. Bring Nihil down and restore Draco's lost eye? Yes, as soon as he thought about it.

The blackness passed into the snake, and seemed to struggle for a moment, as if it had a life and will of its own. But that was Nihil's fault that it didn't, Harry thought smugly. He had pulled pieces of the void into this world, and the void _had _no will. It could do nothing but expand. It couldn't evade danger. Even the piece of the globe that had extended towards them, Harry thought now, had done so either because Nihil had told it to or because it had sensed living flesh and wanted to consume them. It was mindless.

After all, consciousness and pain, suffering and the drive to change, were all part of _life_, not death.

A silent shriek appeared in Harry's ears. He didn't know where it came from, but since it coincided with an increase in the thrumming in his bones, he knew it was probably from there. Nihil had found out what he was doing and was coming, or increasing his attack, or feeding more force to the ball of nothingness. Harry truly didn't know, but he knew that he didn't intend to lie around and wait for Nihil to act.

He envisioned the snake spreading the golden reality inside it all around the ball of nothingness, engulfing it faster than it could by slowly swallowing it.

And suddenly the snake was much bigger, a silver serpent that reared into the sky like a ladder, and Harry was a lot more tired. _That explains where the snake comes from, at least, _he thought vaguely, hoping that he would have the chance to explain the theory to someone else later. _It draws its strength from me._

The snake had folded its fangs back and was all but spitting gold on the ball of nothingness, bright as a dragon's flames. It seemed to be growing dark, but Harry had no idea if it actually was. Perhaps that came from Nihil's impending arrival, or the ball of nothingness making the world around it less real somehow.

He didn't know, and he didn't care. What mattered was that his trap was working the way it was supposed to, and the snake was eating the ball of nothingness.

Then the air in front of him ripped open at the same point as the thrumming increased so that the bones shook in his skin, and Nihil came.

* * *

Draco had listened carefully to Harry's description of fighting Nihil in the camp at night. He had thought he had understood what it entailed; in fact, he had been sure he did, and hadn't expected to feel frightened when he faced the creature—thing—mastermind—himself.

But he did.

Nihil didn't look like the ball of nothingness, the way Draco had thought he might. He didn't look like the yellow cloud of magic that Draco could see drifting in the air with his magical eye. Draco reckoned, with the part of his mind that wasn't cowering away and screaming in horror about the new arrival, that that was because he had disguised himself in a glamour before when he wanted to appear to mortals. This was the way he really was, naked, unshielded, and without even the dream-like atmosphere that Harry had talked about to make him less than he was.

Less _real._ Less hurtful. Less likely to make Draco want to claw his own eyes out and then cut off his ears, so that he couldn't hear anymore.

Shrieks traveled with Nihil. So did smells. Draco could feel those sensations crawling over his face, drowning him. It was like being buried alive in vomit. His body was alive with so much visceral disgust, so much rejection of this _thing _and the death it brought with it, that he couldn't even stand up and fight.

_This is the rejection of life for death, _Draco thought, somewhere within the one part of his mind that remained rock-steady and rock-calm, unmoved by the acts that his body wanted him to commit. _They are opposites. They are also entwined within the worlds, but not in our world. We can't think that way. We're in human bodies, and we can only think with human brains._

Draco battled it, hard, because this might be his one chance to see what Nihil looked like by using his magical eye, and he wanted to know that information so that he could use it.

His eye showed a flaring of tatters, black holes worse than the one in the center of Nemo's aura, sliding mud that reformed into nothingness so dense that Draco's skin felt as if it was blistering from the looking. He stared, though, until his eye closed of itself and a cloud of warm steam arose in front of his face. Reaching up, Draco recoiled. His eyelid over the magical eye bore a large burn.

Nihil lashed out at Harry's snake. Draco knew what had happened only from the way the snake shuddered and hissed. He couldn't see the weapon Nihil had struck with or the method he had used. And that bothered him, but when he tried to open his magical eye again, radiating pain ran through his face. He didn't think he should try using that eye again right now.

A glance to the side showed that Granger was leafing frantically through her book. Weasley stood over her, protecting her, although Nihil hadn't yet glanced in their direction. Ventus prowled around the perimeter of Nihil's body, as far as one could call it that, keen eyes saying that she was looking for a place and way to attack.

A question darted into Draco's mind like a bolt of lightning.

_Where is Herricks?_

He turned around quickly, but he didn't see him. A ball of cold settled into the pit of his stomach. He wondered if Herricks had betrayed them all along, if he had somehow managed to circumvent the oath that everyone swore and which should have held him—

And then Draco shuddered in irritation and dismissed the notion. Nihil was _here_. If Herricks had meant to betray them, it seemed that he wouldn't have much more to do that could damage them.

_Except hurt Harry._

Draco surged to his feet and walked as close to Harry as he dared, holding his wand out. No, he could do nothing about the private battle between Nihil and Harry for the moment, but he could keep him safe in the event that Herricks tried to determine the end of the struggle by casting a mortal curse at Harry from hiding.

No matter where he turned, he didn't see him, but Draco kept looking. This, unlike the confrontation with Nihil, was something he felt he could handle.

* * *

Harry was holding his own, but he didn't know how much longer that could continue.

It helped that he had seen Nihil unshielded once before, and that this time, he had a weapon, or was filled with a weapon, that could consume Nihil. Enfold him. Hold him at bay. But the blows that Nihil launched at him felt as strong as the ones that he had used the other night, and that position had not endured long.

Harry gritted his teeth and held on. So far, the ball of nothingness was continually fading, and the snake didn't appear to dim or grow smaller as it went on. Harry had no idea how much reality the snake had taken from the box in Ventus's robes, or how much was needed to make a ball of nothingness that size harmless, but he would keep on holding on until something changed.

He saw Draco from the corner of his eye, and he saw someone else drawing near. Ventus? Harry didn't think so. He didn't think she could possibly be that close to Nihil without attacking, and Ron and Hermione would have come to his aid by now if they were coming. Nihil might be holding them paralyzed in place by the sight of him.

Nihil flicked out a long, ghastly tendril—trying to look at it was like trying to look death in the eye—and tore a slash down the snake's side.

The snake roared and hissed, and a pain like nothing he had ever known swelled through Harry. He cried out and felt Draco stirring restlessly beside him, wanting to do something and unable to do it. Harry gave him a pained smile that he hoped Draco understood. That was the way Harry had felt before Draco got the magical eye.

The person he had seen out of the corner of his eye moved again, and then Herricks was dashing straight at Nihil, his wand raised and a manic courage burning in his eyes that Harry had never seen or suspected him of. As he stared, Herricks raised his wand higher and higher, and then screamed out, in a voice that should have made Nihil look around if he had any self-preservation instinct at all, "_Ara!_"

Harry didn't recognize the spell, or the white light that it caused to blaze around Herricks's limbs.

Or the way he jumped forwards, a moment later, flying into and vanishing into Nihil as if he had gone a much longer distance than the jump implied.

He only knew that, a moment after _that_, Nihil screamed.


	36. On the Altar

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Thirty-Six—On the Altar_

Draco always felt, later, like he had never seen what Herricks did properly. That would explain why he didn't understand what he was seeing at first. Of course, his magical eye was also weeping tears of pain, so he thought he could be excused for not understanding and feeling impatience; this was just another of Herricks's stunts. If he made Nihil scream, that was just a coincidence, probably based on something Harry had done.

But then he focused on the white light that spread rays out from Nihil, stabbing at the ground and the air, and he began to understand, even as a chill wind of fear traveled down his spine.

The white light turned in on itself, folding into a smaller package instead of expanding the way that Draco had been sure it would. It glowed all the while with energy similar to the packet of reality that Ventus had shown him, and it spat and hissed like a cat with a mouse that refused to die.

In the center of it was Nihil, now masked and made bearable by the presence of the white light. Draco stared some more, trying again to see what he was really like with the help of the magical eye, but his vision still blurred with tears, so he concentrated on the white light instead.

It wasn't white, not when seen through his new eye. Instead, the edges of the steadily shrinking light bore the same half-tame green and gold colors that had surrounded Herricks the last time Draco looked at him, as though the light had taken on Herricks's magic.

As though the light had become Herricks.

_Or the other way around, _Draco thought, and his heart started to pound sickeningly as he remembered the sound of Herricks's spell and where he had heard such spells before. Reading Dark Arts books, yes, but in this case, what they described wasn't a Dark spell. It was used by proto-Aurors serving the proto-Ministry, to fight Dark wizards who couldn't be defeated in any other fashion.

The spell's single word, _ara_, meant "altar" in Latin. The person who cast it made himself into an altar, and offered his life as a sacrifice.

Herricks wouldn't be coming out of the light again.

With one part of his mind, Draco was shocked, but another part had to admire the logic that had prompted Herricks to use that particular incantation, not a possibility Draco had heard mentioned by anyone else. Of course, if he was giving up his life, it stood to reason that the life would be used as a weapon against Nihil. And how many times in the last few days had they said that they had to find a way to do that?

A third part of Draco's mind, separated yet more from the rest, was determined to act as Herricks probably would have wanted, and study the complex magic his life, and life-in-death, had released. He might be able to understand other ways to defeat Nihil if he knew how this magic worked against him.

Ways that didn't involve someone dying.

Draco cast a spell that would dry his eyes, another to prevent salt water from forming so that more tears wouldn't blind him, and a general healing charm. Then he focused on Nihil once again, and threw himself into remembering what he saw. If he couldn't understand it now, he could at least preserve the image so that they could study it later.

* * *

Harry knew he was lying on his back beneath the illusory snake who was swallowing the edges of the globe of nothingness. He could see that if he just looked around.

But he _felt _as though he were holding a weighty, possibly pure silver, pair of balance scales that slid down and tipped heavily to one side, but which someone had just reached into and added a balance to on the opposite side.

Harry gasped and tilted his head back, trying to understand. Above him, the snake continued to swallow the globe, this time unhindered by Nihil. Harry turned his head and saw the white light that he knew Herricks's death had unleashed fading. Nihil would probably be free to attack him again soon.

But he also saw something else.

The air behind Nihil was smoky, hazy, shimmering like a thin curtain. Harry thought he could see another world behind the curtain, one that swayed back and forth, tentative and hasty. Half of the time, he thought, it didn't really exist. It could come to life or be held back in stillbirth or only occur partially, depending on the choices of everyone around them.

In the world was a balance, but Harry didn't see it as a pair of balance scales, this time. He saw a great golden serpent, its eyes brilliant, its scales life-giving, entwined about one that was the blue-black color of the void that Draco had brought back to be made into weapons. They were entangled to the point that Harry didn't think anyone could separate them, and they were wrestling.

Whoever won the combat would determine the fate of the worlds entangled all around them, including Harry's own.

But then Harry looked, and thought again. (He had time for that, amazingly, although Herricks's light was almost gone and he knew Nihil would break out again when it was). The snakes were wrestling, yes, but they never separated, or struck at each other with their fangs. They didn't look as though they would prefer that the other one didn't exist. It was a bit hard to read a snake's expression, but Harry reckoned that he'd had more practice at it than most people.

This was the imbalance between the forces of life and death, Harry thought, but it wasn't the war that Portillo Lopez had told him was happening, or even the unequal balance scales he'd pictured. This was a _cooperation. _The snakes knew they were out of place, and they were trying to get back into it before something drastic happened.

Harry had assumed without thinking about it that the imbalance meant life and death were at war. But why? That didn't make sense, not when he _did _think about it. Life fed death; death ensured that life didn't overrun the earth. It made more sense for them to be in balance in the sense of cooperating, not fighting one another because two relatively minor wizards had decided to try and become immortal or nonexistent.

He went on staring, fascinated, while his snake swallowed the last of the globe and the white light that Herricks, he now understood, had sacrificed his life to create withered and died as a flower would.

As the way that flowers had to do, Harry understood, or there would be way too many of them growing. But death didn't devour things the way that Nihil wanted to do, destroying everything so that there was no chance he could come back to life. Of course there was nothing to be gained from destroying what death needed to feed itself in the future.

Aurors understood life and death in a certain way. That didn't mean it was the only way to understand them.

Harry drifted in the midst of that knowledge for a long moment, feeling oddly exultant. He thought he might be feeling what Hermione did when she discovered some unknown fact for the first time. How true! How simple! How strange that no one else had ever seen it before!

And how nice that he would get to be the one to explain it to everybody!

Then reality came back to life around him with a nasty jolt. The last of the globe of darkness passed into the snake, and Nihil fought his way free of the white light and turned his attention on Harry.

It was worse than before. Harry could feel his body ripping apart, his soul fleeing into the darkness of death rather than withstand what was before him. He brought his hands over his eyes instinctively, even though Nihil's presence was mostly magical and so Harry knew that he would go on seeing, hearing, and otherwise sensing him.

But when his hand moved, it brought the snake with it, and the golden, glowing reality the snake was infused with.

Nihil said something soundless, something that blurred and rippled in Harry's head and then moved through his body as though it would rupture his stomach and any other internal organs that it found. Harry gasped in pain.

But it was only pain. And he found he could breathe again when he glanced up. Nihil was gone as though he had never been, and only staring air remained. Buildings smoldered around them, and Harry could see darting shapes drawing nearer that were either War Wizards or Muggle police, and either way they would demand explanations, but for the moment, he felt as if he could survive anything in that vein. Nihil was _gone_.

Harry doubted that he knew for sure what had caused it, either his snake or Herricks, but he knew that he was grateful. He scrambled to his feet and started winding the snake back into himself, not wanting questions that he literally couldn't answer if the people approaching were Muggles.

But Ventus cried out in welcome a moment later, and Harry didn't think she would do that if they were random people who might need to be Obliviated. At least, he was relatively sure that she wouldn't.

Ventus was darting around the War Wizards like a chicken around her chicks as they came in, asking and answering questions in the same breath. Most of the War Wizards ignored her, or so Harry thought. They were staring at Harry instead, or at the spot where Nihil had stood. They looked unhappy.

Harry finished destroying the snake illusion. He didn't know what had happened to the reality it was infused with, he realized a moment later. It seemed to have been destroyed in containing the ball of nothingness, or perhaps that was what had allowed him to see the reality of the vision of life and death for an instant. Either way, it was gone.

"Have you permission to be here?" the leader of the War Wizards was asking Draco. He looked grave to the point of constipation.

Harry rolled his eyes and stepped forwards. For one thing, he had facts he needed to tell Draco, and for another, he thought things would go better for the comitatus if the War Wizards saw Harry. His scar could sometimes work miracles.

Harry still didn't _like _that, but there was little that he wouldn't do to save the world.

Or to save Draco, for that matter.

* * *

Draco lowered his head and spent a moment composing himself, despite the imposing line of War Wizards staring at him. He was not going to say something wrong because he had hurried. That would be the ultimate in stupidity, when they were the ones who had time on their hands. The War Wizards could hardly rush the comitatus through the interview without losing important information of their own, while the comitatus had survived the immediate battle and couldn't defeat Nihil any faster with their words.

Draco needed to understand what he had seen, to make sense of the vast images and the symbols they represented shifting there, before he made any effort to tell anyone else.

"Trainee Malfoy," said the War Wizard who had spoken before, or so Draco thought. He hadn't paid much attention to that one's identity. "Answer me. Do you have the permission of the Aurors to be here?"

Draco wanted to laugh when he understood the import of the words. It always came back to that, didn't it, to allowance and authority and the _minor _webs of power? He couldn't believe that he had wanted to join the War Wizards, once. Yes, their spells were strong, but what kind of fool ignored the evidence in front of him that earth-shattering magic had been unleashed and instead wanted to know whether Draco was following the Auror hierarchy like a good little trainee?

"Yes," he said at last, because it cost him nothing to do that. "We have the permission of both Head Auror Robards and his second-in-command, Auror Holder."

It was obvious the War Wizard hadn't expected to hear that. He rocked back once on his heels and stared at Draco. Draco stared back, bored and showing it. They had better things to worry about.

Such as the loss of Herricks. Draco was still mostly in shock over that, but he didn't like to think of how Ventus would be grieving, and the way that Holder or Robards—he was less sure about Holder—would try to turn that loss against him as leader of the comitatus.

The War Wizard cleared his throat. "Did you not hear the announcement we made that we should draw back and disengage from the globe? We have the weapons to contain it, but they were stored elsewhere. We had sent several of our number to fetch them. In the meantime, you put yourselves in danger and quite likely caused the appearance of our enemy."

Draco concealed his smug smile. Irritating as the situation was, he knew that they wouldn't have told him even that much a month ago. He had become someone they had to respect, however reluctantly they did it. "But how do you know that they would have returned in time?" he asked. "It's true that we may have caused Nihil to appear, but that means that he was forced to make an attack where he did not intend to. In the meantime, the ball might have consumed the city before you discovered a weapon capable of destroying it."

_If you did. _He left the words unspoken, but the War Wizard confronting him seemed to hear them nonetheless. He narrowed his eyes and turned his head aside to spit on the ground. Draco kept a firm grip on his temper.

"Sir." Harry's voice was calm and as respectful as it ever got, but when Draco glanced to the side, he saw those green eyes filled with the fire he knew. "We should make a report. Can we leave, now?"

The War Wizard closed his eyes, and Draco could see the vein working in the man's forehead. He probably would have liked to keep them there and make them miserable, Draco thought, but they were technically under the command of the Head Auror, and the War Wizards would want to preserve good relations with the Aurors.

"Very well," he said at last. "You have _permission _to leave." He traded sneers with Draco and then turned away.

Draco snorted bitterly and turned his head aside. He wanted to stay and argue, at least with some of his mind. How dare they belittle the people who had saved them? Were they so concerned about prestige and who had done what that they couldn't appreciate Draco and his comitatus lifting the burden from their shoulders?

_And you're doing the same thing at the moment._

Draco squared his shoulders and faced Ventus. She looked at him with an expression wiped clean of everything, then glanced at the place where Herricks had fallen.

"He died defending people," she said. "He died attacking, I know, but he would have thought of it as defending." Her voice was so slow and quiet that Draco couldn't make out from it what she was feeling any more than from the expression on her face.

_That's something, I suppose, _Draco decided. He wouldn't argue with quiet mourning. He would simply keep an eye on her in case it turned into something dangerous later. "We should return to the camp as quickly as we can," he said. "To tell them the news of Herricks's death and—to share the information we have."

He looked at Harry again. Harry blinked tiredly back at him. Draco put one arm around his shoulders and squeezed lightly, trying to convey how impressed and worried he was without words. There were people around who didn't need to hear them.

Harry reached up and touched his jaw with a faint smile. Draco was relatively sure that he understood.

* * *

The person Harry _really _wanted to see when they got back to the camp was Portillo Lopez. He was sure that she was the only one who would know much about the struggle he had seen. Well, Raverat might, too, but Harry was more sure of seeing her since Raverat seemed to stay in his tent and rarely come out at all nowadays.

But since there was a hierarchy of rules to respect no matter how much they might not have wanted to, they had to go and report to Holder and Robards first. Harry followed Draco to the tent, and stood solidly behind him while Draco described what had happened. When Holder turned and pinned him with an iron gaze, Harry recited the details about the snake illusion and how he had swallowed the reality.

That pleased no one. Harry hadn't really expected it to.

"You _swallowed _some of our best weapon?" Holder sat still, but Harry knew her well enough by now to see the tension in the lines of her arms, and the way she twitched as if she would stand up and stalk about the tent. Robards leaned back in his chair and watched her more than the rest of them.

"If I hadn't, then the globe of nothingness would have gone on expanding," Harry said. It was best if he remained as calm and inoffensive as possible, so that no one would get the impression that he was angry about this. He was only angry about the delay. He was _proud _of what he had done.

_Although I didn't do it in time to save Herricks._

Harry shook his head and blinked. He honestly didn't understand what had motivated Herricks to make that sacrifice, except that he obviously had something greater in him than any of them had known about. Harry wouldn't do honor to his memory by blaming himself, though. Herricks wouldn't have wanted that.

Or else he would have wanted it, because he would think it was a sign that Harry was about to take the comitatus from Draco. Harry honestly had no more idea about what his character had really been, anymore.

"You could have done something else than rid the world of a portion of our _only weapon_," Holder said, and tightened her fingers on the arms of her chair until Harry thought she would break something.

"It was the only thing I knew to do," Harry said. "I did see two great snakes struggling behind Nihil that I think represented the forces of life and death in the imbalance, though."

As he had known she would do, Holder dismissed that and continued to berate him for sacrificing some of the reality Ventus had brought back. Harry doubted that she thought his vision important. Draco, though, was staring at him, and he answered the next few questions Holder asked of him inattentively.

The moment they were outside the tent again, he cornered Harry and snapped, "Why didn't you mention that before?"

"Because I don't understand what it means," Harry said. "I'd wager that you don't understand everything you saw with your magical eye when you looked at Nihil, either."

Draco blinked and rocked back on his heels. "How do you know that I was looking at Nihil with my magical eye?" he asked, but he was no good at lying when it was on a subject this important to him.

_Or maybe I just know him too well, _Harry thought as he answered. "You were staring at him for so long. You couldn't have avoided noticing what he was doing and what he looked like, even if you weren't specifically trying to gather information."

Draco gave him a small smile, and then said, "I need to write down the symbols and show them to someone I'm more certain will understand them."

"Such as Portillo Lopez," Harry said, and then smiled blindingly back at Draco when Draco blinked. "Can you suggest a better candidate? Especially since I know that you distrust Raverat."

"No," Draco said. "I can't. Let me create a list, and you create one, and then we can both take them to her."

Harry glanced around. Ventus had already left, but Hermione and Ron lingered nearby, with Hermione leafing through her book frantically. Harry decided that he might as well do something for her, which Draco didn't seem inclined to at the moment. "If you find something that you think relates to defeating Nihil, then you'll come and tell us at once, Hermione, right?" he asked.

"Yes!" Hermione said, and all but ran away, probably going back to their tent to find a table where she could spread the book out and take notes. Ron rolled his eyes at Harry in a gesture that seemed to plead for compassion and then followed her.

Harry turned back to Draco. "Do you think that one of us should find Ventus and make sure that she's not too torn up over Herricks's death?" Holder hadn't reacted much to _that _news, Harry thought. She'd been far more concerned over the loss of the weapon that she believed that captured reality could become.

"She won't kill herself or do something drastic because of him," Draco said. "She's not that kind of person. I think she'll practice more intensely at her spells, which can only be to the good." He looked pointedly at Harry. "In the meantime, we should start making our own contribution to the war effort."

Harry followed him, frowning. He wished that he could mourn more for Herricks, but the simple fact was that he had mostly known the man as Ventus's partner, an occasionally good Auror, and someone whom Harry had wished would be less of a bully and arrogant claimant to Draco's position as the head of the comitatus. Harry was sorry he was gone, but more for Ventus's sake than simply because he had died.

_I can salute him, though. And wonder if I would have the courage to do what he had done. _

_And whether that was what defeated Nihil, more than the snake illusion that I summoned._

* * *

"I think you are right."

Portillo Lopez raised her eyes from the simple notes that Harry had put down about his vision of the two serpents struggling, and they shone. Draco bit his lip. She hadn't looked that way when she examined his notes on the symbols he had seen shifting around Nihil.

Draco himself didn't know what they meant. Dead roses, blasted deserts, glass masks, thrones of bone like the ones that Granger had seen more than once…he didn't understand. But he had written them down because he thought they were important, and Portillo Lopez seemed unable to understand how.

"Not an imbalance in the sense that we understand it," Portillo Lopez was murmuring, her curved hand scooping out strange gestures in the air. "Or at least, not the same _kind _of imbalance. Not a struggle, but a dance. The way we perceive things not being the only way. The way that Nihil handled them—and the fact that they appeared with him, as the background that he was acting against, rather than in service of him—it is not as bad as we feared. He has not made himself master of death. He operates in that context like any other necromancer."

She whipped around suddenly, and laughed, a pure, bright, clear sound. Draco exchanged mystified looks with Harry. He didn't know what that meant any more than Harry did.

"Yes," Portillo Lopez said. "That is it. That is the way to defeat Nihil."


	37. Like a Scythe

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Thirty-Seven—Like a Scythe_

"What do you mean by that?"

Draco's voice was irritated, the way it always was when someone came up with a new idea before he did. Harry could understand it this time, though. Portillo Lopez's announcement had gone through him like a scythe, and then made an electric buzz spring up in his head. She hadn't properly explained yet, either, instead gazing in rapture at her notes, which made Harry want to shake her until she did.

Portillo Lopez blinked and turned her head, attention slowly focusing on them as though she had to bring herself back from a long distance to see them as people instead of contributors to her ideas. "Hm?" she asked.

Draco spaced his words far apart, leaning forwards as though he shared Harry's desire to strangle her. He probably did, Harry thought, and once again, couldn't bring himself to blame Draco for that. "You said that you knew how to defeat Nihil. Tell us what that means. If experience is any guide, you'll run off to your Order soon, and they may or may not do something soon, but we'll be left in the dark. We're tired of that."

Portillo Lopez raised her eyebrows in such a perfect chiding motion that Harry thought Snape could have learned something from her. "No need to be like that about it," she said mildly. "I had only just realized it myself. I would have shared it soon."

"Now," Draco said.

"Compared to the perspective in time I adopted a few minutes ago, soon is now, now," Portillo Lopez said, and luckily went on speaking, so that Harry didn't have to deal with Draco bursting a vein in his head. "It came to me when I began to think of the struggle between life and death as a dance, the way Trainee Potter suggested I do. And that corresponds with the symbols around Nihil that you saw, Trainee Malfoy."

"Tell us how." Draco had backed off a bit, but he still radiated tension and impatience. Harry placed a hand on his back, cautiously. Draco stiffened as if he would shrug it off, but ended up sighing and relaxing into it. He never took his gaze away from Portillo Lopez, though.

"They are both symbols," Portillo Lopez said. "Intense areas of high magic can produce visions like this. Visions of reality itself are, in fact, common, but the human mind casts them in a form that we can deal with, and so observers may not always know what they are looking at. You saw the forces of life and death, Trainee Potter. You observed them in Nihil himself, Trainee Malfoy. That suggests that Nihil is a force of the same kind that life and death are. Part of the same reality."

Draco looked ill, and Harry felt the sharp shiver that ran through him a moment later. "So Nihil can't be defeated," he whispered. "If he's become as basic to the fabric of life and death as that idea suggests—"

"Not _basic_," Portillo Lopez said, casting him a pitying glance that Harry was glad Draco didn't fully notice, or there would have been bloodshed. "_Part._ He can't escape, after all. He isn't floating off in some isolated magical plane, the way I almost believed he was. He isn't exempt from the working of reality, even though he _is _exempt from the working of death. That's what we didn't see before. That's what we missed. We looked at him as someone who had mastered death and wasn't subject to life; we didn't see that he might be subject to their both working at once, the sum of the parts rather than either separate one."

Harry thought he could grasp the idea, dimly. Even so—"That doesn't really tell us how to defeat him," he pointed out.

Portillo Lopez smiled at him. "It tells us that he must react like other magical entities who have something unusual about them. He isn't invulnerable. He may not follow the same laws as other necromancers, but we can still harness variants of those laws in this war, rather than having to make them up on the fly." She paused and cocked her head like a curious bird. "I do wonder if Voldemort might have followed some of the same rules."

Harry found himself standing up. For a cause like this, he would be willing to explain some of the things about Voldemort and his reactions to them that he had wanted to keep hidden from the prying eyes of the public. "What do you need to know?" he asked.

Portillo Lopez's eyes rested on him for a moment, musingly. Harry wondered if it was his imagination that there was pity in her gaze. As long as she pitied him for what had happened, though, instead of for his attempt to contribute now, he thought he could live with it.

"How strong was his influence over the balance between life and death?" Portillo Lopez asked. "How close did he come to achieving his goal? Why did he want that goal in the first place? These are not all questions that may have answers; some of them are probably lost in time, or to the memories of people who are now dead. But anything that you could tell us would be valuable."

Harry hesitated. It wasn't that he didn't really trust Draco and Portillo Lopez with the knowledge of Horcruxes and the way he had died to get rid of part of Voldemort's soul; he had told them enough bits and pieces that he doubted what he had to say would surprise either of them. It was just that he didn't know how to make himself sound like anything but an arse when talking about it. He would have conducted himself during that war _so _much differently now.

_Starting with rescuing Draco from the Manor._

But there were some things that he couldn't change, so Harry nodded and began. Draco was the one who had _his _hand on Harry's back now, and Harry had to admit that it felt really good to have that support to lean back against.

_There might be a way._

* * *

Draco had been irritated because he had suspected that Portillo Lopez wouldn't explain her reasoning. He had wondered whether her answer would be too theoretical for him to understand. He had a slight burn of resentment now that everything seemed, as everything always did, to come down to Harry.

But the predominant sensation he had felt when Portillo Lopez had told them that there might be a way to defeat Nihil and end the war was a wash of cool relief, and he could still feel the echoes of that as Harry spoke.

There was a way to get out of this endless war. Draco still wanted to be a leader, he still wanted power and glory, but he no longer felt the need to have them at the expense of everything else. Working through the hierarchy of the Aurors, working with the comitatus, and perhaps losing an eye had taught him that much. There were things he valued more, even if it was difficult to see that at times.

Harry finished describing the way he had defeated Voldemort with an _Expelliarmus, _and Draco looked instinctively at Portillo Lopez. She didn't, somewhat to his disappointment, tell him that there was a simple spell they could use to defeat Nihil in the same way. She stood there, eyes closed, swaying slightly in deep thought.

And then her eyes flared open.

"It is the same principle," she breathed. "I do not believe that Nihil has actually used the Horcrux theory, because he can bind himself to any living object. But the bonds are still there, the same way that, once one knew of the Horcruxes, Voldemort was no longer indestructible. The idea that he was was based on illusion only. And Nihil has encouraged and fostered in us the illusion of his total power. That, I think, is one reason he has struck across lines so often in inconsistent attacks such as the ones he used Nusquam and Nemo for. He would have been pleased to achieve something with them, but that was not their main purpose. Their purpose was to keep us afraid of him, to think that he could appear at any moment, anywhere, and do anything."

"We knew that already," Draco snapped, because he had hoped that this was a real answer, and so far it sounded like Portillo Lopez was simply rehashing what they already knew. "We'd reckoned that Nihil was doing this because he knew that he could keep us afraid if he did. So why are you repeating it?"

Portillo Lopez gave him the kind of smile that Draco hated, the distant one that was only a step away from pity or any other sort of false compassion. He tightened his grip on Harry and fought for calm. Harry turned to him with a blink, as if to say that he found Portillo Lopez's conclusions revealing and wished that Draco would hush so that he could hear more.

With an effort, Draco controlled the temptation to snap and inclined his head to Portillo Lopez, waiting to hear what she would say.

"Yes, he is doing this because he wants to make people fear him," Portillo Lopez said slowly. Draco didn't think she was picking her way over unfamiliar territory, but trying to be as clear as possible for someone simple-minded. Since he had done much the same thing to her a moment before, he bit his lip and nodded. "But there might have been something behind that pretense. We didn't know how strong he was. We didn't know what this Dark Argus that took your eye was, or why it could force itself past the camp's defenses. Now I think it was only ever bluffing. He wanted to frighten us so that we wouldn't look too closely into some of his activities, or realize what he didn't want us to realize." Her eyes narrowed in triumph. "That he is part of the same spectrum of reality as all of us."

"So he can be killed," Harry summed up.

Portillo Lopez nodded to him. "Perhaps the correct term would be 'made not to exist,' but yes, it is possible."

Draco nodded back to her, and hoped that his expression helped make up for his snappishness earlier. Yes, that _was _information that they hadn't known before. "But what is your plan?"

Portillo Lopez turned back to face the table on which their notes were spread, along with her own. Her eyes shone, and she moved with purpose. Draco didn't think he'd seen her this excited since the night when Nihil had attacked while almost everyone was asleep and her spells hadn't done anything.

"We could sever his connection to reality, in the way that Trainee Potter destroyed the Horcruxes," she said. "But not even that would provide a solution in and of itself, because when the Horcruxes were destroyed, there still remained the physical shell of Voldemort's body to deal with. What we must do instead is encourage Nihil to remain connected, to become still more connected, so that we can trap him in one corner of the vast space he can command and force him to retreat."

Draco blinked. "Like the vision that I saw in the Mirror of Secifircas," he said. "Make him paranoid enough, and he might retreat into the ball of nothingness, knowing that nothing could touch him there."

"In both senses of the word nothing, yes," said Portillo Lopez, and smiled at him. "And if we can enfold that space in reality, then we win."

"How are you going to convince him to retreat?" Draco asked. "He'll be more panicked than ever, once he figures out that we know he's not invulnerable. I can't think of anything that would frighten him enough to make him flee, especially now that he seems to be on the verge of filling the world with his balls of nothingness."

Portillo Lopez simply shifted her glance so that she was looking at Harry, which, in a way, was its own kind of answer.

"Does everything have to depend on him?" Draco asked quietly. He knew that he was asking out of both concern for Harry and exasperation that everyone still seemed to depend on him even after they had seen that he worked most effectively with the comitatus, but at least his concern for Harry was sincere, unlike the majority of emotions that Portillo Lopez and most of the other Aurors would be feeling. "Just because he defeated one threat doesn't mean that he can defeat others."

"I know that," said Portillo Lopez. "What's needed at the moment is courage to take on this task, more than anything else."

_And she knows that courage is the one quality Harry has more of than any other, _Draco thought, swallowing angrily around the lump in his throat when he remembered the way that Harry had befriended him in the past, the way that he had charged ahead in various dangerous situations, the way that he hadn't hesitated to sacrifice his life if it meant that he could rescue Draco or someone else.

"It would help if you told me what the task was," Harry said, with more calmness than Draco would have thought he could muster under the circumstance. Harry did swallow, once, but that was hardly remarkable. And he didn't volunteer without hearing what the plan involved.

His worst fears assuaged, Draco smiled at his partner. Harry smiled back, and then turned to Portillo Lopez. Draco happily decided to stay quiet until he spotted a question that he could answer.

They supported each other.

* * *

As a matter of fact, Harry already suspected what Portillo Lopez's plan was, at least part of it. Her eyes hadn't gone to the scar on his forehead, whatever Draco thought; she had looked at the air around him, as if she had seen his snake illusions hovering protectively above his shoulders.

Harry could do this because he could summon the weapons that would attract Nihil's attention, distract him, and confuse him. But Harry doubted that he would be the one killing this particular Dark Lord.

_If you can call someone a Dark Lord who wants to destroy everything instead of rule it, _he thought.

"It would, wouldn't it?" Portillo Lopez asked, in the tone of someone having a revelation. Harry rolled his eyes. He had accepted, by now, that there was no way to hurry her. He would only have to hope that she revealed everything, rather than keeping some of it back because she thought that he couldn't understand it or only the Order needed to hear it. "Very well. I want you to hold Nihil in one place while we open an access to the reality around him."

Harry nodded. Rather what he had thought, then. But something about the words she had just spoken didn't make sense. He hunted about in his mind until he found it.

"I thought you said he was part of the same reality we are," he said. "Why do you have to open an access to where he dwells?"

"To that particular _part_ of the reality," Portillo Lopez said. "The same way that you use an Apparition to go from one part of it to another."

"Most people call those places," Harry said, irritated. "And I appreciate that it might be a bit more complicated to Apparate to where Nihil is, but surely it's not so different that you have to use an entirely different language."

"There is a subtle difference in magical theory, in fact," Portillo Lopez said, sounding as if she were coming to life. "The duality of time and space is a fascinating topic, but I fear that we have time for no more than a few brief notes on it. When one Apparates, one is going from one place to another only in the classical sense, in the same way that the sky is only blue to the untutored eye. What really happens—"

"Harry distracts Nihil, and you open a gate," Draco said. "What happens next?"

Harry grinned at Draco in gratitude for translating, and Draco nodded back before he focused on Portillo Lopez.

"I believe I know a way to make him fear," Portillo Lopez said, slowly, eyes focused on the wall of the tent as though she could make a hole through it that would show her the way to Nihil's secret heart. "Yes, I do. If he was allowed to cause baseless fear in us, if it served his purposes, why should we not do the same thing to him?"

"Are we _sure _that we can make him fear?" Draco asked, frowning. "I thought that was the problem, or one of the problems. He didn't fear anything because he can't die, and he can't die because he's already conquered death in every way possible for a mortal."

"But he does not know every law and detail of existence," Portillo Lopez said equably, "or he wouldn't have had to create parts of himself that were devoted to research. He wouldn't have had to adopt Death Eater discoveries from their caches. He could have simply acted on the knowledge that was already present in his—I hesitate to use the term _head_." Harry grinned, and then wondered whether he wasn't supposed to find that funny. Draco was simply leaning forwards, and didn't appear to notice anything amusing about it. "We can assume, therefore, that he is aware of the existence of phenomena that he doesn't know anything about, and we can, perhaps, panic him into a possible stampede by implying that there is more of it than even he knows."

"Maybe," Harry said. "How are we going to do that, though? From what you've said, he realizes that he doesn't have anything to fear from your Order."

Portillo Lopez smiled. It was a bit disturbing. "He need not realize that _permanently_," she said.

"It'll have to be a good lie, to make him fear it," Draco said, with a doubt that made Harry feel more confirmed n his own. He had thought that Portillo Lopez was being a bit optimistic about their ability to trick Nihil, but then again, he didn't know enough about the Order of necromancers to be absolutely sure.

"Yes, I know," said Portillo Lopez. "And that is one reason that the both of you are going to act as though you believe it."

* * *

Draco clenched his fists and took a deep breath, reminding himself for the fourth time that this plan was the result of several days of intense discussion and training. That didn't actually help, though. He was still waiting outside the Auror camp and essentially trying to bait Nihil into arriving.

On the basis of an unproven theory offered by an Order of necromancers that Draco didn't know if he could actually trust, despite the vows offered by individuals like Raverat and Portillo Lopez.

On top of everything else, Harry and he had been separated.

Draco still didn't understand the necessity of that. Once Portillo Lopez had said that they would try to trick Nihil into fearing them, Draco had assumed she'd dropped the idea of a distraction technique focused on Harry's snake illusions. Why wouldn't he? Nihil, panicked, would be easy enough prey without having to use Harry's snakes and put _him_ at risk.

But Portillo Lopez had had some more complex game in mind, or she had wanted to examine Harry's magic as he used it to fight Nihil. Draco suspected it was the latter. Portillo Lopez was not one to give up her theories on the edge of battle.

Draco understood her reasoning perfectly well. It had been explained several times, thrashed out between them, the rest of the comitatus, Raverat, Portillo Lopez, the other Aurors who had been their allies—and who, if they were displeased to learn of the comitatus going off to glory in London, had hidden it well—and Holder, and Draco thought that it would work. He would simply have preferred to have Harry under his eye.

Both of them, really. Draco had discovered that the magical eye was good at telling him when Harry's emotions were swirling about his mind, because the colors of his power would become agitated as well.

Now he paced back and forth in the darkness, shut his eyes more tightly, and called up and clung to the vision that Portillo Lopez had conjured for him. She had made an actual vision, using illusions, glamours, and memories in a complex mix that she had then placed into a Pensieve.

Draco went on thinking, repeating the details of the vision in his head until it was clear. Then he turned his head in a random direction. Portillo Lopez had told him to look in the direction that he thought Nihil was most likely to be, but she had more faith in Draco's powers of intuition than he did.

Draco imagined the vision with such intensity that he felt as if it were playing out before his eyes.

He imagined the Order flinging silvery ropes, with hooks at the end of them, catching around the tendrils of the monstrous and indistinct figure that he'd come to picture Nihil as. He had accepted that his brain wasn't adequate to hold the reality of the figure he'd faced on the battlefield in London, so he just built up the closest approximation and used that. The Order's hooks and the ropes were the important part.

Draco envisioned the hooks tearing into the nothingness that made up Nihil's "body" in this vision, ripping it apart into small and separate chunks. Then Order necromancers, all of them dressed in cloaks and hoods as they had been when Draco first met them, concentrated on each of those small pieces, chanting spells that destroyed them.

Draco infused the vision as best as he could with fear and awe. He still didn't think that Nihil would be stupid enough to fall for this, but their best chance of trying to make sure that he did was to fill one's head and heart with those emotions, so that Nihil would at least be attracted.

He thought he felt a faint vibration in the direction of the southeast. Draco faced that way and once again projected the vision.

A long snarl came out of the darkness, though there was no mouth to make it. Draco smiled coldly. He had heard sounds like that before, and he was sure that this was Nihil, or at least the part of him that he had dedicated to watching for threats from his enemies.

He heaped more detail into the vision, as though he was watching it happen right now, or imagining it, or dreaming it. The Order necromancers clustered in a line and knelt down, aiming their hands at the scattering shreds of Nihil's being. Their voices rose and fell in a disciplined chant, bringing down the tiny birds that Nihil's darkness became as they tried to flee to safety. When they succeeded, they rose to their feet without fuss or anger, the way Draco thought they would, and turned to the next target.

Nothing that Nihil could come up with would escape them. Nothing that he could do would foil them. They had finally discovered the one weapon that would suit against a being as powerful as Nihil, and they would soon be ready to use it.

A blast of cold air in the face made Draco stagger backwards. As his magical eye blinked furiously, he saw swirls of chill yellow and dark red appear in the air in front of him-some of the colors of magic that he had seen forming around Nihil's true being in London.

The colors gathered themselves, churned together, and funneled into a being much like the Dark Argus, complete with glowing eyes and skeletal hands.

Nihil had sent his beast _here_, instead of simply being distracted so that the Order could sneak up on him.

_I knew they shouldn't have separated me and Harry, _Draco thought, more than slightly breathless, and prepared for battle.


	38. Final

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Thirty-Eight-Final_

They hadn't told him that what he would have to do was fucking _impossible._

Harry stood in the forest that Portillo Lopez had Apparated him to, his arms wrapped around himself. He could just have used a Warming Charm, but then he would probably get overheated. He knew that the chill didn't come from the mild summer night around him; it came from the thought of what Portillo Lopez and her Order of necromancers thought he would be able to accomplish.

Harry shivered and paced in a circle. He would have liked to be with Draco, but Portillo Lopez had explained why that was impossible. Draco was the one sending the distracting vision; Harry had to be in another place so that he could weave the snake illusions around a different part of Nihil. Nihil's ability to divide himself and make tendrils meant that Portillo Lopez didn't think he would go himself to confront Draco, especially since he had been wounded in his last confrontation with the comitatus. They needed to send the fear of the vision from one direction, make him appear to Harry in some form that could be held, and then use both combined as a distraction that would keep Nihil from seeing the real plan.

It sounded unnecessarily complicated to Harry, but he accepted, grudgingly, that they couldn't trust Nihil to simply walk into a trap and bring all of himself with him. Of course, that didn't explain why Portillo Lopez thought only two traps would be enough. Why not three?

Or maybe it _did _count as three, since the Order would be attacking from a different direction. Harry shook his head in impatience. When this war was done, he vowed, he was going to study magical theory until it made _sense _to him, even if it took the rest of his bloody life.

Abruptly, something changed in the atmosphere of the night around him. It was as though a skunk had suddenly died and added a putrid odor to what had been a sweet breeze. Harry turned in the direction that he knew marked the Auror camp, eyes narrowed. Portillo Lopez had said he would know when Nihil began to respond to the vision Draco was projecting, but not how.

This felt like it, though. Harry swallowed and conjured up his own portion of the vision.

Draco was imagining what _could_ happen to Nihil, thanks to the Order's having supposedly discovered this secret weapon. Harry was supposed to imagine that it was happening right now, to a part of Nihil.

_I knew Nemo would come in useful for something, _Harry thought, and started to imagine as hard as he could. The hooks that the Order had conjured-or would have conjured if this vision had been at all real-were ripping into Nemo's flesh, tearing it apart in ways that nothing else could have. Instead of becoming useless blood and skin, or clots of oblivion, Nemo was yielding his secrets to the Order.

What secrets? Harry didn't know. That was part of the reason that Portillo Lopez had chosen him to project this part of the vision, since she knew that Nihil knew that Harry wouldn't understand all the magical theory, and that would make the threat both plausibly vague and more real.

_We are trying to panic him, _she had said, when Harry complained about, essentially, being used for his stupidity.

Harry shut his eyes and concentrated until he could see the light gleaming on the hooks. And Nemo was screaming. He had no trouble imagining _that_, after the screams that he heard during the war.

The night shifted again. This time, Harry could feel it as a shimmering and shivering in his bones, like someone had struck them with a tuning fork. It was similar to, though not exactly the same as, the way he had felt when Nihil launched his attack on the Auror camp all those nights ago.

_He's coming, _Harry thought, and continued to concentrate on the idea of Nemo being torn apart as if he hadn't noticed.

But when the air ripped and the immense glamoured being that was Nihil landed in the middle of the clearing, filling Harry's eyes and ears and nose and all his senses with that sensation of drowning in acidic mud, Harry was ready for him, snakes coiling and hissing in each hand.

* * *

The Dark Argus had thousands of eyes, and thousands of claws. All of them seemed to be staring and scraping, respectively, at Draco in those first few seconds of the fight.

But Draco had an advantage he hadn't even realized was an advantage. His magical eye painted the darkness around the beast with lines and shimmers of vast color, lines that seemed to link to nothing at first and which Draco was tempted to ignore-until one line suddenly slanted a moment before the great clawed hand on the left came down and struck towards Draco.

His magical eye could see the motions the beast would make, and allow Draco, in turn, to counter those motions the instant before they happened.

Draco laughed aloud, and had the impression, from the way the lines of color twisted and coiled, that the beast hesitated. But he didn't allow himself to dwell on that for long. It was an advantage, yes, and one that he had to utilize fast, before the beast realized what was happening and covered the hole in its defenses, or, more likely, received something from Nihil that would allow it to do so.

He saw the red line that led to the right hand flare with blue, which the line leading to the left had done before it moved, and so aimed his wand at empty air and shouted, "_Ardeo!_"

The air burst into flame, an expanding wheel of fire that was actually best-suited for taking out enemies at the margins of an area-

Like the Dark Argus's right hand, as it moved down and into the edges of the conflagration a moment later.

It made no attempt to escape until a few seconds after, Draco noted, when even more red lines turned blue. That told him even more. It, or the magic that controlled it, was slow and deliberate. It _couldn't _react fast to new situations that suddenly developed; it was as though it had to think about things.

He smiled, and watched for a moment as the fire shimmered across the bony hand, wondering what effect it would have. He hardly wanted to cast a spell that wouldn't work, no matter how tempting some of the fire spells would be to use on a creature that had trouble reacting to change.

The flames faded, and left behind a dangling, blackened finger. Draco grinned, decided that was good enough for now, and whirled into the battle.

* * *

The snakes grew from Harry's arms, from his head, from his chest and neck and eyes. He had envisioned only a crown of snakes at first, but that became a cloak, and that became armor. He only had time to see a few of them-who looked like golden cobras, the infinity pattern drawn in dark ash on their hoods-before they all struck at once, lunging forwards and holding onto Nihil.

Nihil said something, or perhaps hissed something, in a language so foul that Harry felt as though parts of his earlobes were simply melting away. He gritted his teeth against the pain and conjured fangs on the snakes that were already hanging on, making them sink deep, like the hooks that Portillo Lopez had told him to imagine.

Nihil roared and thrashed like a lion. Then he lifted his head, or rather a head-shaped part of the blob turned Harry's way, and Harry was caught by a pair of eyes that, so far as he knew, Nihil hadn't used before. One of them was a golden eye that imitated the shine coming from his snakes.

The other was Draco's grey eye.

Harry hesitated for just a moment, which weakened his snakes, and Nihil sent a tendril sliding and slicing through their protection, landing on Harry's shoulder and inflicting a sucker-shaped wound.

Harry shivered. It didn't exactly hurt. It was just very _cold_, and flashed blue-black at the edges.

It was the color that told him what Nihil must be doing. He was feeding the void into Harry, filling his veins with death the way that Nemo had done with the creatures that he brought back to life from ancient bones. Harry had no idea what would happen to him once the process was complete, but he doubted it would be anything good.

Irritated, he focused his mind on the glowing golden warmth of the reality that Ventus had stolen from that other, more vital world, and imagining it pumping down the fangs of his snakes into Nihil, taking the place of the venom that might be there if they were poisonous.

Nihil screamed aloud.

The sound set up vibrations in Harry's bones and made his head sag on his neck. The wound on his shoulder seemed to widen and to grow colder, although honestly, Harry didn't know how it was doing that. He trembled and felt an intense weariness coming over him. What did it all matter, after all? They were never going to defeat Nihil; he was simply too powerful. And hadn't he fought in enough battles, seen enough wars? He should feel free to rest, because no one else had ever be expected to do so much.

_No_.

Against the despair that seemed to have taken the place of fear among Nihil's weapons, Harry raised a barrier of ferocity and free will, courage and compassion. Dumbledore might have manipulated him and kept the prophecy from him, but Harry had still chosen to fight in the war. Nothing could have happened unless he had willingly sacrificed his time and his efforts and even his life against Voldemort. Nothing would happen here, could have happened, if he had not chosen to fight the war against Nihil. He could have dropped out of Auror training, as many had after the war became obviously dangerous. He could have refused to study the compatible magic with Draco. He could have refused to partner with him. He could have gone on studying necromancy and not listened to Draco when he begged him to stop.

So many choices, and everything would have gone differently.

So Nihil had chosen a poor weapon when he tried to tell Harry that nothing he did made a difference.

The cold flowing into his wound seemed to falter. Harry lifted his head and thought again of reality pouring through the snakes' fangs, hitting Nihil in the face or whatever other body parts he might have available for hitting, weakening him, driving in warmth and life as he was trying to pour the void into Harry. How long since Nihil had seen the sun, held an animal in his arms, tasted fruit? All those were experiences of the outside world, of the world that Nihil had decided he would do his best to destroy.

The sucker withered and fell away from Harry's shoulder. The snakes' bodies thickened, grew stronger and brighter.

_That's it, _Harry thought in wonder. _This is a battle fought on the mental plane as much as anywhere else. Maybe it's because we're using fear against Nihil or because he's more powerful this way than any other, but what we _think _can hurt him._

Harry changed tactics, and thought this time of his love for Draco, of the way that their compatible magic flowed through them when they were using it, of how perfectly they dueled together, or how Draco arched above him, head tossed back, eyes fluttering, when he was coming-

Nihil screamed in pain, a sound like the harmonics of crystal bells shattering to Harry's ears.

_Oh, that _really _hurts him. _Harry laughed dizzily. _I wonder if it comes partially from the fact that I'm thinking of togetherness, and Nihil doesn't know what that means? He's just this whole melded _thing, _and all the people he works with are parts of himself. He's always alone. It's not real cooperation._

Nihil turned his formless head again as if he had heard that, and a new sensation stabbed into Harry's brain. This wasn't the cold of the void, but something worse, something draped and flowing with black rottenness. It only took a moment until Harry was gasping silently, bent at the waist as he struggled to control his reaction, coughing as he tried to remove the gag that it seemed intent on clapping into his mouth.

Thickness. That was the best way to describe it, he thought, from behind the building wall. Uniqueness. Nihil was trying to isolate Harry from his thoughts and his friends by tapping into the feelings that lay smoldering uneasily beneath the surface of his mind, bringing up all those moments when he'd felt himself alone or so different that no one else would ever understand him and cramming them together into one barrier like packed earth.

Memories of Dudley flashed through his head, and the way that Dudley had laughed and taunted him, telling him that no one would ever love or want to be with a _freak. _Draco drew away from him, turning his head aside as he declared that he could never be with someone who practiced necromancy. Ron left him in the Tri-Wizard Tournament and again during the Horcrux hunt, and Nihil was working hard to ensure that Harry didn't remember him coming back.

Harry answered with grim resolve: the memories of going away to Hogwarts, of reconciling with Draco, of Ron returning of his own free will when he realized that Harry was in danger. But those memories were thin and shivering, wailing things next to the solid muscle that Nihil rammed into him.

His snakes began to flicker and change. Nihil laughed in his ears, not taunting; the laughter was too dead. But it was horrible anyway.

Harry reached out instinctively, before he thought about it, seeking a source of strength that had once meant everything to him, that the Aurors had trained him to work with, that he had once sworn to lean on and consult before he did anything too dangerous.

_Draco!_

The word rang across the miles between them, Harry didn't even know how many miles, and he found himself holding his breath, hoping that Draco would hear him and send help before it was too late.

* * *

Really, it was almost too easy fighting the Dark Argus, at least once Draco had noticed the messages from his magical eye. The beast always struck where he wasn't, and soon it was roaring in frustration and waving its claws in random patterns.

Or they must have seemed random to it, at least. It still couldn't move without the magic to direct it, and that meant magic to signal it. Red turned to blue, and Draco was out of the way or ambushing it, or, several delicious times, casting a wind spell that meant its hand traveled further than it was meant to and scraped against itself, causing chunks to fall off.

_Draco!_

The cry turned his head, wrenching it physically to the side, and for a moment Draco lost track of the lines of magic and the Dark Argus as he viewed them only with his ordinary eye. The beast's claws swept over his head, parting his hair with the riffle of the wind, and he ducked beneath them only just in time, tucking his arms around him to roll. The beast roared or chuckled and shuffled forwards.

_Harry!_ Draco reached out, uncertain, fumbling. They had never tried to stretch their compatible magic over a distance this great.

He received only silent distress. There were no more words, and Draco was uncertain what Harry wanted him to do. The silence was maddening. Harry might be dying right then, and although Draco was sure that he would feel that, he didn't know what he was supposed to do to stop it.

Then he firmed his mouth and nodded once. The cry had been a cry for help, and there was only one kind of help that Draco thought he could furnish from here, or that Harry would ask for.

He flung the compatible magic out in a reaching stream, a skein that sought and hopefully found the reaching hand that sought it. For a moment, he thought he felt Harry grasping it, and gratitude and wonder flowed through it. Lips brushed the skin beneath his ear; a hand touched his hair.

Then the skein lapsed, and left Draco shaking and facing a beast that he had weakened but still couldn't defeat. None of the spells he had cast had touched the glowing eyes.

Draco formed his mouth into a quiet snarl. Well, he would just have to do something about that, then.

And then it came to him that there was a certain kind of magic he had been avoiding, and he snorted in amusement and spread one hand. The wand followed it in a pointing line, and he reached back into his memory for the incantations he had found in books in his father's library.

He hadn't used Dark Arts so far. But Dark Arts were as likely to work on a beast made of bones and death as any other. Nihil's magic was neither Dark nor Light, but something beyond either.

But not undefeatable. Portillo Lopez had promised him that much, and that meant Draco had to believe her and stay alive while he could.

"_Ad finem!_" he called, and his voice was strong, even as magic began to bubble and boil in his gut that he had never called on before.

The beast snarled and came a step forwards, into the spell's range.

Draco arched his head back as a black beam burst from his wand. It encircled the beast and flung it-not physically, but magically-to the uttermost limits of its time on earth, sucking greedily at its existence, swallowing it the way a parasite would swallow blood.

The spell was the only one he could think of that might work on a creature like this, driven by death instead of life. A curse that swallowed life-force would be useless on it, but one that simply swallowed the force that bound its bones together ought to work. It wasn't a _natural _creature, after all. Draco thought he could count on that to end its existence as quickly as possible.

The Dark Argus roared in silence and struggled against the whirlwind that seemed to have surrounded it. Draco watched, panting, from his knees, and smiled when it seemed as though the Dark Argus was about to retreat into the void; the air around it turned blue-black and shimmered.

It wouldn't matter if it did retreat, or at least that was what Draco remembered from the description of the spell. The spell would follow it wherever it went, and continue drinking until the last of the binding force was gone.

Draco was somewhat surprised the creature was still standing, to be honest. Perhaps it mattered that its body was so much bigger than a human's, and so the curse had to work harder and take longer to eat what made it stand.

The Dark Argus shuddered, once, and its claws rose as if it would scrape out its own face. Then it simply collapsed, the dark whirlwind of the spell vanishing in the same instant. Draco ducked several times to escape the thud of bones around him and the smaller, softer patter that he thought was eyes.

When he looked, it was all over. The creature that had taken his eye and scarred his face lay dead around him, and Draco surged to his feet panting with triumph, and turned his head in the direction of Harry's earlier call.

He was going to find his partner now and battle beside him, the way it always should have been.

And fuck what Portillo Lopez would say if she knew.

* * *

The strength that passed into Harry nearly lifted him into the air; it felt as though someone had strung a wire beneath his feet.

He rode the lightning up and up to an invisible height, and then dropped, shaking, back into his body. His breath hissed through his teeth; his hands felt new and unfamiliar on the wand. For a moment, it seemed as though Draco was _with _him, physically present, standing behind Harry with his arms wrapped around Harry's waist. Harry felt a hand in his hair, soft lips brushing the softer skin beneath his ear.

Then the sensation faded, but it didn't matter, because new life was pumping into the snakes that held Nihil still, and Harry could see, by turning his head, that the cold-dripping wound in his shoulder had already faded.

He laughed aloud.

A roar came in response. Nihil was turning in for another attack, and Harry could see that golden eye, paired with the grey, staring at him, trying to push fear into him so that he would surrender and fall apart, and Nihil could get on with things.

Harry shook his head and pushed the fear away from him with one hand, and then attacked with a new snake that grew from behind his ear. It was as golden as the others had been, but with fangs that shone more, and a coiling tail, and eyes that were wide with intelligence. When it struck, it drove Harry's confidence into Nihil, and the compatible magic, and the feeling of togetherness and love that he had shared with Draco-

And his fearlessness.

Harry realized that he had found another weapon that would work against Nihil, and chuckled viciously as he employed it. Nihil had to live with the knowledge that he was always a coward, part of him so broken by the fear of torture that his immortal servants could be destroyed by it. Harry had gone through greater fears and had been willing to die to spite them. Nihil had fled death instead, and had sought ever since for what he had thrown away.

Nihil cried out in his mind. Harry knotted his hands together and grew a snake from between their entwined fingers, one that had two heads. One head contained green eyes, the other grey.

This one lashed out and tore the eye Nihil had stolen from his head.

The scream then was deafening, thunderous, filling all the world, and Harry went to one knee as he heard it. But the sound behind it was pain, not outrage, not fear, and that cheered Harry. He readied the two-headed snake to strike again, this time picking a target lower down Nihil's body. It was too much to hope that Harry would hit his groin-if he even _had _a groin in this particular incarnation-but he could still hope to inflict a mortal wound.

And then Nihil turned and cried out again, and Harry was sure that the emotion behind _this _sound was despair. Harry smiled. The Order must have found a way through to attack Nihil directly.

He vanished.

Harry called the snakes back into him at once, and stood there listening to the vibration in his bones. It was ridiculous to think he would be able to tell where Nihil had gone, but he listened anyway.

A distant groan rose and fell, and then there was silence. Harry smiled slowly. The vibration in his bones had gone.

Portillo Lopez had said that Harry would know when Nihil had retreated into the ball of nothingness and so could be cornered and enfolded in reality. Harry didn't know for certain if that had happened, but it seemed likely.

Which meant, of course, that Harry was going back to Draco. He didn't know where the main battle was right now, and it would be stupid to try and find it. He belonged with Draco.

He Apparated, the noise of battle still in his ears.


	39. Enfolding

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Thirty-Nine-Enfolding_

"Harry!"

Harry nearly caromed off Draco as he landed, and shook his head. He hadn't expected to Apparate into a Draco who was trying to Apparate to him. He held out his hands, and Draco clasped them and held himself upright, swaying.

"You're all right," Harry said, staring at the bones on the ground and trying to make it sound like a statement instead of a question. Draco probably heard the question anyway, since he stared at Harry with slightly narrowed eyes before he nodded.

"Yes. More than I expected to be when they _separated _us." His fingers curved into Harry's arms, and Harry reckoned he still hadn't forgiven Portillo Lopez for making the suggestion. "I want to know what happened. Did Nihil find you? Did you battle him in the way that Portillo Lopez had suggested?"

"With snake illusions, yes," Harry said. "And with weapons of the mind. Fearlessness. Courage. The memory of you." He grinned. "You sent compatible magic to me across the distance between us, didn't you? So it's as if we were never really separated at all."

"Don't be a fool, Harry, of course we were," Draco snapped, but Harry could see the glow in the back of his eyes. He laid a hand on the nape of Draco's neck and briefly brought their lips together. When he pulled his head away, Draco stood there with his eyes shut, smiling.

"I didn't know you could do something like that," Harry said softly. He knew they should get on with things, but this was important.

"Neither did I," Draco said, opening his eyes and blinking. "Not across a distance as great as that," he added suddenly. "Of course I never doubted that I could do something like that when there was a _need._"

Harry concealed his smile in the palm of his hand and nodded earnestly. "Right. Nihil fled. I think it's safe to say he's in the ball of nothingness, or one of them, if it's ever safe to say that. What do you think we should do now?"

"Find Portillo Lopez," Draco said at once. "And the rest of her Order. But the comitatus, first. Ventus was going to venture into that other reality to retrieve more of the light for us, and I don't know that she ever did." He paused, his eyes dimming for a moment, and Harry wondered if he was thinking about Herricks's death and how he should have done more to make sure that Ventus was all right after the loss of her partner. It was something Harry had winced over in the last few hours.

"Right," Harry said, and sent a Patronus leaping into the world with a gesture of his wand and a nonverbal spell. He could sense Draco's pursed lips, and grinned. That was part of the reason he'd done it.

The silver stag turned towards him, scraping the ground with a hoof, and Harry told it, "Ron, you need to come here right away. _Go_." The Patronus sprang into the air and vanished midway between the ground and the stars.

"Someday," Draco murmured, "I will learn to cast one of those."

"Someday," Harry agreed, and didn't bother not to sound patronizing.

Draco narrowed his eyes further, until they were slits, and then released a long, deep, shuddering breath. "It's incredible," he whispered. "To think that we might resolve this tonight. That the war might be _over._"

Harry shuddered back in response and leaned his head on Draco's shoulder, thinking of the war with Voldemort and what he hadn't had anyone to share with him at the time.

They stood like that until Ron's Patronus shot back to them, followed a second later by Ron, Hermione, and Ventus themselves. Ventus was holding a small box that shone gold and a smug expression. Harry nodded to her and then watched as Draco pulled out the Portkey that was supposed to take them to Portillo Lopez in an emergency.

It turned out not to be necessary as Portillo Lopez appeared before them, her hair mussed and clotted with blood along the side of her head. She nodded to them as they stared, then said, "He has retreated. We must go, now, and I do not think we will get much time." She held out a smooth stone towards them.

Harry thought all five of their hands descended on it as one, but even if that wasn't true, he _knew _that his and Draco's did.

* * *

Draco opened his eyes past the swirling colors of the Portkey's working, and froze.

He had known that the Order was going somewhere special and secret to work their gate open to Nihil. When Portillo Lopez had explained about the theory that connected parts of reality to one another, Draco had thought that she meant only that they had to pick a site Nihil had used in the past, mystically determined by connections to other sites that only a necromancer-killing assassin could sense.

He hadn't expected them to stand in the smashed trainee barracks outside the Ministry.

_Well, it's fitting, _Draco decided a moment later, when he could get his heart to slow down, and turned to Harry. He was standing with his mouth open, staring at the ceiling above them, which had a star-shaped hole in it. When he caught Draco looking at him, he shut his mouth, shook his head, and started to say something, but Portillo Lopez interrupted them.

"We should have guessed the truth before this," she said, her eyes bright and her posture so straight she seemed not to have a head wound. "Nihil likes symbols, and he spent some time pretending to be an Auror instructor. He was hiding in the place that he first began his attacks." She cocked her head to the side, listened to a signal invisible to Draco, and then nodded. "Yes. Here."

A figure moved in Draco's peripheral vision, and he bolted around with his wand aimed, but it was only Raverat. Raverat didn't even bother reacting to Draco's sudden turn; he nodded to Portillo Lopez and said, "Yes, no trace left."

"Good." Portillo Lopez turned to Granger. "I would like your confirmation on that, if you please, Trainee Granger."

"What do you mean?" Draco snapped. "If it concerns one of my people, then I ought to know what you're talking about."

Granger half-shook her head at him. "It's something we've been talking about in the past few days," she said, "Raverat and I." Draco opened his mouth to ask why he hadn't been involved with or noticed that, and then shut it again when he remembered that he and Harry had been rather busy thinking about the notes that they were going to present to Portillo Lopez and the plan she had come up with for them to participate in. "I think I can get a general impression of safety or danger in the near future with my-Seer abilities." _At least she still flinches when she talks about them, _Draco thought in some satisfaction. "And it helps when I'm in one specific place. I was able to predict it when Ketchum assigned one of the other trainees to attack me from behind, and then predict when he claimed he had but he really hadn't. I should be able to sense whether Nihil is going to attack in the next few minutes."

She bowed her head and crimped her fingers open, the way that Raverat had done around Draco's head and Harry's when he investigated them. She turned to face in a certain direction, towards a pile of rubble-Draco thought it was southeast-and took a slow, deep breath. When she exhaled again, her eyes snapped open.

"Nothing," she reported. "I don't think he left any guards here. He probably didn't anticipate pulling back all his tendrils at once."

"All his tendrils are in the ball?" Draco demanded. "Do we know that?" Harry's fingers rubbed soothingly up and down his arm, but he wasn't about to be soothed without some extra conformation that Granger, Portillo Lopez, and Raverat were right. "I thought there was no way to sense that."

"Not directly," Raverat said. "I believe we can trust Trainee Granger's abilities to sense danger, though, and there would certainly be danger if a tendril was still free enough to detect us."

Draco nodded reluctantly. "Where is the ball of nothingness?"

"Here."

Portillo Lopez had gone over to the other side of the cracked and ruined room, which could have been his and Harry's room when they were in the barracks for all Draco knew; the chambers had never been that unique, and a lot had changed. She was bending over a sheltered corner with an extended hand. Draco winced, but when they came closer, he saw that her fingers were an inch or so from the ball.

"I've searched, and the rest of my Order has searched, and found no other clot of the void in these halls, nor any place where he might bring the void through," Portillo Lopez said quietly. "I believe that it is here."

Draco swallowed and glanced sideways at Ventus, who had come up with the box in her arms. She looked at the ball of nothingness, at his face as if she didn't know why he was concerned, and then nodded and started to open the box.

"Wait, Trainee Ventus," Portillo Lopez said sharply. "We must wait until Trainee Potter summons his snake illusions."

"I want to do it on my own," Ventus said. "He killed my partner. I want to stop him." She said the words with a faint smile, but Draco had seen that smile before and knew how hard it could be to counter.

"Will you still listen to me?" he asked, leaning forwards so that she could see his face. "You know that if you open the box, the reality will simply spill to the ground without any chance to contain it. Is that the fate you want for a weapon that you risked yourself to get?"

Ventus paused, seemed to ruminate, and then responded, "I know that I can be the one to enfold the ball of nothingness."

"How?" Raverat asked. Draco started to say something else, but again Harry stroked his arm and silenced him.

"Because I looked up a spell that would allow me to do so, of course," Ventus said, and Draco thought she sounded disgusted with the world's stupidity for the first time in all the months he'd known her. She tapped her wand against the box, then against the ball of nothingness, or near it. Draco thought her wand would have vanished had she touched it. "_Implico nihil_," she whispered.

To Draco, it sounded like an ordinary Covering Charm, and he opened his mouth to say so.

But bright red sparks were coursing around Ventus's wand. As Draco watched, they began to emerge from the box as well, until they covered it in a scarlet cloak hanging almost to the ground. Ventus shook the box, and the sparks resolved into a fall of shining cloth.

"Trainee Ventus," Portillo Lopez breathed.

"Shhh," Ventus said, and repeated her spell. The cloth spun slowly in midair, then broke away from the box and dangled from her fingers instead. Ventus whispered the spell a third time, and the cloth extended straight up and out, swooping and yearning towards the ball of nothingness.

Down the bridge it made ran the gold of the reality that Ventus had fetched. It looked like thick golden oil, of the kind that Draco and Harry had more than once used as lube. Draco felt Harry snort beside him.

But none of them made any noise as the cloth bowed but didn't break under its burden, and the gold reached the ball of nothingness and sealed around it in a first, thin shell. More and more gold came after it, and Draco swallowed, beginning to believe it would be as easy as that, after all.

Then the shell broke.

Tendrils writhed out from the ball, aiming towards them all, dividing and multiplying as Draco watched. Harry's hand clamped down on his arm, and then Harry and Portillo Lopez stepped in front of him, blocking his view.

"_Harry_," Draco hissed in his ear, and tried to drag him out of the way. But Harry shook him off, giving him a single glance that flamed hard enough to make Draco's tongue catch against the roof of his mouth.

"No," he said. "I know that you mean well, Draco, and I'm not acting without considering, but I think this one has to be mine."

* * *

Portillo Lopez nodded slightly beside him, confirming his guess. Or was it a guess? Harry wondered, turning back to face the cloth that was steadily ripping and the swaying black portions of Nihil. It felt more like a certainty.

Life and death made a balance. He had seen that with the images of the serpents. They couldn't help to simply cage Nihil and dismiss him from the world. They had to give him a reason to appreciate life again.

Harry thought he knew one.

He waited until one of the tendrils snaked near him, and then conjured more illusions from his hands and grasped it. This time, they were hulking dark snakes, black boas marked with reverse patterns of gold, and they flung their coils as well as their mouths around the tendril, not eating it but holding it captive.

Harry closed his eyes and thought of the moment when he had walked into the Forbidden Forest to die.

The shades had come forth to greet him, and he'd seen his parents for the first time in something other than a photograph or Pensieve. Harry had gone to Voldemort of his own free will. Dying had been more painless than he had expected, and he had a choice. Dumbledore had said so.

Nihil had a choice, too.

Down the tendril Harry pushed it all, those thoughts of the free moment in his mental King's Cross when he could have decided to stay if he wanted. He came back not because he had to, but because he wanted to.

Nihil might never understand that kind of love and sacrifice, but he had understood a different kind, once. He had gone to find his brother and rescue him from the hands of Death Eater torturers when he was still Daffyd Dearborn, and he had become Nihil in the first place because he _had _to get beyond the pain. He'd had an urge to survival, not just to annihilation.

Beside him, Harry could hear dimly, Portillo Lopez was chanting, her voice rising and falling in steady Latin syllables. Harry didn't understand a word of them, and it didn't matter. Nihil was feeling these thoughts as he'd felt Harry's compassion and fearlessness during their earlier battle.

Laughter again scored Harry's ears. _You cannot want me to live, not when it would mean so much evil for you._

_No, _Harry answered. _But you can still choose to die, rather than resist. Isn't that what you wanted in the first place? To cease to exist? You can choose it, and not be driven to it like an enemy or an animal._

There was a silence that ran deeper than the mere lack of words. Harry could feel it in his bones, flooding over him. It took away every sound except Portillo Lopez's words, and he thought he might be imagining those.

Harry reached out and behind him, towards the members of the comitatus. He gathered them close together: Draco and the love Harry felt for him, beating in him like a second heart; Ron, who had made mistakes and come back to make up for them more than any other person Harry knew; Hermione, who could see some of the future and a lot more of the past; Ventus, who didn't know what fear was. He wove them together so that he could show Nihil his choice.

_I live, _he said. _I didn't just give up and seek destruction because it would have meant destruction of people like these. You can't choose life in the old way, but you can still choose._

More silence, but Harry sensed it going out now like a tidal wave, and knew that it would fall on him in much the same way. He winced and braced himself, still pulling the thoughts of his friends and his loved ones close to him, winding them around him like ropes or twine.

Sirius was there, making his first offer of a private home for Harry. It had never worked out, but it had sustained Harry, and that was enough to make Harry still love him, never mind what came later. Dumbledore, smiling and admitting to his mistakes and offering Harry that choice in the middle of King's Cross. Even his parents, little as he'd known them, waving madly from the photographs.

Hagrid, his first friend. Hedwig, dead in the war but not forgotten. Remus, who had made mistakes but had gone back and faced up to them in the end. Teddy Lupin, who Harry hadn't spent enough time with.

Out he reached and gathered them close, all the people who had cared for him. There were more than he had ever thought there were, more than he would count in a normal frame of mind, and he experienced a brief moment of warmth, pride, and wonder.

_I never knew that I was so loved._

Portillo Lopez's chanting, distant until now, soared abruptly to a crescendo. Harry gasped as the memories he had entwined with surged to the side. Portillo Lopez, in some way that he didn't understand, was grasping and weaving them into a new cloth that took the place of the cloth Ventus had enchanted, which was strong but not strong enough, since it had been magic and Nihil could oppose magic.

And then she reached out-Harry could feel the flowing of the spell and the way she touched the people he had been thinking of, both-and pulled similar memories from Draco, Ron, Hermione, and Ventus. Harry, half-opening his eyes, thought he caught a glimpse of Herricks's face, and Narcissa's, and Mrs. Weasley's, and a man and a woman who would be Hermione's parents.

He didn't know how Portillo Lopez was doing it. He hadn't known that she _was _capable of doing anything like this. But he could hear Raverat's voice joining hers, and the net of memories, stronger than Harry had thought it could be, visible mainly because of its warmth, settled into place around the ball of nothingness, singing and shining.

The silence in Harry's bones that he knew represented Nihil was motionless now. He found himself holding his breath, unable to tell what would happen next, but no longer afraid as he had been.

Draco embraced him from behind and leaned his head on Harry's shoulder, and together, they waited for what would happen next.

* * *

Draco knew it was necessary to save the world, but still, he could have done without the questions Portillo Lopez had asked his mind and memory in order to find out the people whom he loved. And he could have done without those memories being added to the mesh that surrounded Nihil.

So he thought, and steadfastly ignored the part of him that was squirming in pure pleasure.

Portillo Lopez finished her chant on a high note; Draco could hear the squeaking and croaking in her throat, and suspected that she couldn't have gone on much longer without her voice faltering, in any case. She brought her hands down hard, and then they were left with Raverat's chant. He moved a step forwards, looking at the ball of nothingness as though it was the center of his universe, his hands gesturing to the sides as though he was spinning the net Portillo Lopez had woven to catch a fish.

When he brought his hands together, Draco could feel the resistance. Somewhere, Nihil was screaming, over and over, silently. Harry tensed against Draco as if he heard it and felt sorry for the bastard. Draco didn't, and didn't want Harry interfering, so he simply squeezed his shoulders and waited for the moment when things would be over.

Raverat closed his eyes. Draco had the impression that they might have burst from their sockets otherwise. His voice trembled, and Draco listened intently, wondering if Portillo Lopez could take it up if he slipped on a word or dropped a syllable. She stood by as if she had no intention of doing so, arms folded, head critically cocked to the side. Apparently she judged his performance and didn't find it wanting, Draco thought. He had to take some pleasure from that.

Raverat's fists touched.

The net of memories and warmth spun out and encircled the ball of nothingness.

Draco's scars seemed to burst into fire. He went to his knees without even thinking about it, crying out in pain. One of Harry's arms encircled him, and Draco shut his eyes, trying to concentrate on the comfort and not the pain.

He felt that way because Nihil was writhing in torment, he realized. Nihil felt the enfolding of that reality-both the kind that came from their memories of life and the golden reality that was flowing down after it-as torture. And there was nothing that he feared more than torture.

The pain flared, more intense and higher. It was emotional pain mostly, Draco thought, mingled with perhaps some memories of what he had suffered when he was in Death Eater hands.

Though hardly able to move, Draco brushed his fingers over his Dark Mark.

It worked, that reminder of the people who had destroyed Caradoc Dearborn and, in a way, caused Nihil's creation in the first place. Back he writhed, and back, and the agony in Draco's scars began to die.

Harry's hand dropped to rest on his arm, too, partially overlapping the Dark Mark. Draco turned his head and rested his cheek against Harry's knuckles.

Harry had died once, and changed the balance between life and death. The Death Eaters had done the same thing, if unwittingly. Choice and accident, Light and Dark, good and evil, balanced by love, they hovered there, and Nihil retreated from them. The net and the reality covered so much of the ball of nothingness that, when Draco forced his eyes open, he could no longer see it.

The last sound Draco ever heard from Nihil was silence, a great wave of it that broke blue-black over him and made him think for a moment that he was back in the void. But he wasn't. That was simply the way it sounded, and the wave raced over him, crested, and broke.

They surfaced again.

Fear and pain had driven Nihil to surrender rather than continue existing with such terror. Draco saw the gold of the reality flare once, and then it melted into wisping tendrils, shredding away and drifting apart.

Raverat's chant stopped. They stood there in real silence, and Granger was the one who asked. "He's gone?"

"He's gone," Portillo Lopez confirmed, voice heavy with wonder.

Quiet descended once more. Draco turned his head and let his cheek fall fully on Harry's chest, listening to the beat of a living heart.

"Draco," Harry whispered. Draco forced his eyes open to see Harry staring back at him, face softly lit as though by starlight. "Your scars."

Draco reached up and found flaking skin that fell away with a touch.


	40. Epilogue

Thank you again for all the reviews! And thank you for reading to the end of the trilogy. This is it, the ending of both _Seasons of War _and the Running to Paradise trilogy.

_Chapter Forty-Epilogue_

"...for unusual and exemplary service in times of trouble, I present you both with the Order of Merlin."

Draco kept his eyes demurely down, but he was listening, and he heard the sour note in Robards's bluster. He smiled at the ground, still a thick carpet of summer grass, although it sometimes seemed to him as though Nihil's war had carried them straight through into another winter. _No harm will come to him, doing something generous for someone he dislikes once in his life._

He felt the slippery silk of the ribbon slide past his neck, brushing and catching in his hair for a second, and then the medal settle, flapping, into place on his chest. Draco reached up one hand, unable not to, and caressed the smooth surface of the metal.

He knew that Robards was wincing, above him. Draco ignored that. He finally had an Order of Merlin. It was _his, _a decoration that the rest of the wizarding world couldn't take away and couldn't ignore. This would be first-page news in the _Daily Prophet, _after all, especially since they'd already reported on the ending of the war and the way that Nihil's living dead had spontaneously crumbled to dust one afternoon a week ago.

_I did it. I achieved something that people will have to honor me for, and that future generations of Malfoys will respect._

Draco paused at the end of that thought. He hadn't thought seriously about future generations of Malfoys in some time, because, being with Harry, he had accepted without lots of consideration that they wouldn't be happening. But now they filled his head, visions of children gazing at his portrait, and he couldn't shake them.

_Who knows what I can convince Harry to put up with for my sake, though? _he thought, and so was smiling when he rose to his feet and turned around, in front of Robards and next to Harry, to face the exploding flashes of the cameras.

After that, they had to get out of the way so that Weasley, Granger, and Ventus could receive their Orders of Merlin, too. Draco tried to ignore the idea that the honor was a lesser one if shared with Weasel. It probably wasn't, and Harry would kill him if he said it.

Besides, he and Harry were the ones in front and the ones receiving all the attention and praise. Draco could put up with someone getting a good share of both as long as he got the lion's share.

"Vain," Harry breathed into his ear, because apparently Harry could be telepathic when he wanted to be. "And greedy. Always." He flicked his tongue against Draco's earlobe, not caring that the cameras flashed eagerly at that, too.

Draco turned to look at him. Harry's eyes widened in what looked like excitement. He probably expected Draco to yell and start a fight that would end with them flat on their backs in bed, Draco thought, safely out of the public gaze that Harry still hated.

Instead, Draco leaned forwards, hooked his hands in Harry's hair, and gave him a snog so ferocious that Harry was staggering when Draco released him. He licked his lips, blinked, and said, "Er."

The cameras flashed, and someone thought the "Er" would make a clever newspaper headline and promptly wrote it into being. Harry was embarrassed when he saw it, but Draco only smirked at him and tore the article free to keep. He thought he had made his public statement as loudly as could be expected of him.

* * *

Harry found Ventus sitting on a hill outside camp the day it was due to break up. The Aurors had declared a month's holiday for all trainees. Harry thought they needed the time to put together a reasonable program, decide what to do about interrupted classes, and build new barracks, but if they called it a holiday, he was more than happy to go along with it.

Ventus sat with her knees propped beneath her chin, arms wrapped around them. The posture bothered Harry, but he couldn't say why until he sat down beside her. Ventus had never looked so _small _before. Harry was used to her spreading out and taking over any space she entered, mostly by not caring about the objections that people might make to her doing so.

"You're mourning Herricks, aren't you?" Harry blinked and touched his lips a moment later. He hadn't known he would say that.

Ventus nodded without taking her gaze off the distant horizon. "No one else will," she said.

Harry winced. It was true that he and the rest of the comitatus hadn't given as much thought to Herricks as they should have. They had attended his funeral, along with most of the other Aurors and trainees, and the ceremony that awarded him a posthumous Order of Merlin. Draco had participated, with Ventus, in packing up his artifacts and shipping them back to his family. But they hadn't spent much time, thought, or attention on him beyond that.

"What was he like?" Harry asked. "Was he your lover?" He never would have dreamed of asking Hermione such a question, but Ventus was different.

Ventus slid a sideways look at him, and then smiled. "No. I don't need someone like him. And I know why he died, too," she added meditatively. "He was still trying to prove himself. He wanted everyone to respect him, to think he was a hero, and he thought that was the best way to do it."

Harry winced. "That's a bit-" _Bloody awful _was what he wanted to say, but on the other hand, Ventus didn't seem upset about it, so that silenced him. He scratched his head and wondered what he _could _say that would make things better. Nothing, it seemed. That couldn't make up for ignoring Herricks during his lifetime and making him feel as if he _must _prove himself, because he wasn't any good otherwise.

"Yes, it is," said Ventus, countenance calm. "It is." She paused, then turned to look at Harry. "I think you inspired him with the desire to be a hero."

Harry winced again. "I didn't mean to," he said.

"Why did you take it in the nature of an accusation?" Ventus widened her eyes to give him a puzzled stare. "I was merely stating a belief. 'I think' warns the listener of that."

Harry paused. He had the feeling he usually did, which was that Ventus was either laughing at them silently behind her serious mask or simply went through life in what she thought was such a sensible manner that she didn't even notice when someone else misunderstood her. He looked at her, and she looked back, blinking at times. Harry didn't think the blink was indicative of anything. If he asked, she would tell him it was to moisten and rest her eyes.

"All right," he said at last. "But I do wish that I had inspired him to do something _else. _He could have been a hero and lived."

"No," Ventus said. "_You _can. You have more skill than he did, and more luck, and more friends. His own arrogance caused people to distance themselves from him, so he could not have the last, and the first two must be developed over time. Unless you believe that luck is a blessing of some kind or a matter of pure chance, which I don't," she added, in the kind manner of someone attempting to conciliate a common delusion.

"Well, then," Harry said. "I wish that we hadn't acted like we forgot him right away."

"Why not?" Again, the puzzled stare. "You didn't like him, and he hurt Nihil but didn't show us the way to defeat him. You and Draco came up with the way to do that."

Someone would have to be very comfortable with themselves to be around Ventus for long, Harry reflected. "Well, I wish we'd paid more attention to him," he said. "We could have done that."

"Yes, you could have," Ventus said, and went back to looking into the distance.

"Are you still thinking about him?" Harry had to ask, although he didn't know that he would like the answer. "Did _you_ forget him?"

"No," Ventus said. "I liked him, and I recognize his arrogance in myself. So I am thinking about him, and mourning him. As he was, not as I would have liked him to be."

After that, there seemed to be little that Harry could say. He ended up patting her shoulder awkwardly-she didn't notice-and leaving her alone, though he did think as he went that a lot of people could have worse mourners than Ventus.

* * *

"My son."

Draco had to close his eyes before he reached out to embrace his mother. They were in private, in the entrance hall of the small house where she had hidden, but she would still disapprove of showing too much.

"Let me look at you," Narcissa murmured, and stepped away from him at last. Draco had to remain still while her fingers traced the rims of his eyes, hovering near the lashes of the magical one. She had always been an expert at keeping her emotions concealed, and he had no idea what she was feeling as she stared at it.

Then she looked back at him and smiled, swiftly, uncomfortably. "You chose a handsome one to replace your natural eye," she said.

"Yes, I did." Draco caught her hand and squeezed it. "I wished for you," he added, because he wanted to say it, and before his self-criticism could silence him.

"Did you, indeed?" Narcissa gave him a small smile, which might be her way of saying that she approved and appreciated the declaration. Might be. She once again looked back at his magical eye, and then away. Draco studied the tight swirls of gold and brass that traveled in circles around her and wondered whether her magic and her emotions were both that calm. He had learned to read the way that Harry's magic reflected his feelings, but it was something that would take more experience for him to master with others.

"I am sorry that I could not be with you," his mother added then, voice low.

Draco recognized her own offering to strong feeling, and took her hand. They walked on in silence, further into the house, into a room set up partially as a sitting room and partially as a library, with comfortable chairs sprawled in front of a large fireplace. It was the sort of place that Draco remembered his mother having in Malfoy Manor, the sort of place that he thought she would create wherever she was. Narcissa took the chair nearest the fire, and Draco the one further, half-ducking his head so that she wouldn't have to watch the way the light dazzled off his silver eye.

His mother called, and one of the house-elves appeared with a tray that held two glasses. Draco smiled, knowing what it would be before he tasted it. Apparently the Black house-elves had had a recipe for a warmed mix of brandy, milk, and pumpkin juice that ought to have tasted disgusting, but didn't. His mother had made sure the Malfoy elves learned it shortly after her marriage.

They drank in silence for a moment, and Draco enjoyed the spice sliding down his throat and watched his mother. She had her head half-ducked, too, and frowned into her glass. Draco knew she would say something neither of them would enjoy debating, so he waited.

Narcissa looked up at last and said, "Of course you are not going to become an Auror, after everything that has happened."

Draco felt the stillness that invaded his body. He was glad it hadn't stiffened his hand so that he dropped or crushed his glass. He shook his head. "I am going to become a full Auror," he said calmly. "If I achieved an Order of Merlin as a trainee, who knows what else I can do once I have the full training?"

His mother spent a few moments drinking and doing nothing else. Then she said, "You were in danger all the months you were a trainee, Draco, which is supposed to be the one relatively safe time during an Auror's life. What would happen if you became a full Auror and went into battle against Dark wizards regularly?"

Draco smiled at her. "I would be one of them, and the most dangerous one on the battlefield, having training from both sides. Besides, with Harry and the comitatus around me, I don't anticipate having to face them alone."

Narcissa frowned. "I admit," she said, "that I thought this was a fancy that would pass off. I understand your wanting to see the war through, but now that it is done..." She shook her head. "The future, children, your heritage. All those are important, Draco. How are you going to integrate them with the life you want?"

"I don't know yet," Draco said. "I also know that it doesn't matter as much as you seem to think it does, Mother. I know that I can have _both _the things I want and the things I need. It all depends on willingness to take certain risks and having the support of the people who matter." He caught her eye firmly.

Her brows puckered. "That sounds like a threat."

"Not so much a threat as a declaration," Draco said. "I won't listen to you if you try to talk me out of this. I'll mourn my father, but I won't listen to him used as blackmail on me because of what he would have wanted, either. I'll accept your criticism, but not treat it as the only thing that matters. I have Harry, now, and I'm slowly making friends with the rest of the comitatus. I can exist on my own outside the narrow box with 'Malfoy' printed on the side."

Silence fell again. His mother turned slightly in her chair to look into the fire. Draco remained quiet, knowing it was the best thing he could do right now, and perhaps the only one that would convince his mother to accept his decision.

"I saw you always as someone with a whole heart," Narcissa murmured at last, "unlike your father, who could care about both his family and about the politics that might destroy them. I know myself divided, as well, and pulled in different directions. I had thought you would pass from interest to interest, but give yourself completely to them while you cared about them."

Draco smiled at that. "I take after you, then. I can imagine worse ways to exist."

His mother didn't smile back. "And what _will _happen when you long for children?" she whispered. "The fantasies of some experimental brewers aside, that is the one thing your lover cannot give you."

"I don't know yet," Draco said calmly. "Perhaps that's the greatest difference, Mother: I can put up with the uncertainty. You had your fate settled early on by your family and your marriage to Father. I don't know what will happen in ten years. Perhaps I won't be an Auror. Perhaps I'll be married." _To Harry, _he thought, but he didn't really know why he was so quietly certain of that, either. "But I take comfort in knowing that if I find myself split in different ways, I follow in the best family tradition."

Reluctantly, then, it seemed, his mother did smile, and move on to other subjects. They spent the rest of the evening talking about the war and Harry, or at least the parts that Draco felt able to reveal to her.

When he left, Draco stooped down to kiss her cheek, and felt her raise her hands to cradle his head. He pulled back to see her staring him hard in the eyes.

"You have become an adult," his mother murmured. "I value that. I succeeded at least that much."

"You did," Draco said, and kissed her on the mouth this time, before he prepared to Apparate back to the Auror camp.

* * *

"Trainee Potter."

Harry jumped and turned around. He'd been proceeding down a corridor in the Ministry, called in by Robards to settle some kind of other honor on him. Harry had been mentally preparing himself to argue that he wouldn't accept any honor unless Draco received it, too, because he had done just as much to win the war as Harry had. It was hard to go from one set of thoughts to another.

"Battle Healer," he said, when he realized it was Portillo Lopez behind him, her headscarf wrapped tightly around her hair. He bowed to her. "Was there something you needed to speak with me about? About the war?"

"I wanted merely to say farewell, as I will not be one of your instructors when you return from the holiday," she said, and held out her hand.

Harry blinked and grasped her wrist. "Er, thanks for telling me," he said. "Have you already said good-bye to other people?"

"Yes," Portillo Lopez said. "In various ways. Your partner will receive an owl from me." She nodded to him, added, after a moment's pause, "You were good in battle," and then turned around to go.

"Wait!" Harry called after her. "Why are you leaving?"

Portillo Lopez blinked at him over her shoulder, looking like an owl. "We've received reports of another necromancer working in the distance," she said. "We need to track down the reports and see how much substance there actually is to them, then close in."

Harry blinked. "In the distance? In Britain? Is it likely to threaten the Aurors?"

"Oh, excuse me," Portillo Lopez said. "In the distance is a frequent phrase that my Order uses when discussing other dimensions and universes. It makes more sense than treating one point as the center." She nodded to him once more and was gone around the corner before he could think to ask questions.

For a moment, Harry had a vision of a silent, endless war, carried out across multiple worlds, with only your vows and your Order for company...

Then he dismissed it with a shudder. _Two wars is enough for me, thanks._

* * *

"Yeah, _fuck..._"

Draco arched beneath Harry, digging his fingers into Harry's back as Harry moved inside him. Harry was panting, his hair flattened for the first time in Draco's memory. He lowered his head down and bit and kissed and licked the side of Draco's neck.

Draco half-barked, his body seizing up in a familiar way. It usually took him longer than that, though, and he writhed in place, spreading his legs further and driving himself down. Harry bit his shoulder, then moved his head to the side and blew on Draco's ear.

Draco came embarrassingly fast, splashing all over Harry's belly. At least it was followed by Harry swallowing a cry and spurting in return, coming with such a shocked look on his face that Draco was still laughing about it after he pulled out and flopped down on the bed beside him.

"Oh, so my best efforts are pathetic now?" Harry grumbled. His face was flushed red and stupidly contented, though, so Draco doubted that he was as angry as he pretended. He rolled over and combed his fingers through Harry's hair, sighing as the strands curled around his knuckles and then sprang away.

"Not at all," Draco said. "You just should have seen your face."

"I wouldn't trade that for seeing yours," Harry said.

Draco had to close his eyes for a moment, the way he had with his mother, but he did manage to turn the statement that would have liquefied him to good account. "Yes, I like the way I look without the scars," he murmured, turning his head so that he could see the mirror he'd put up in his bedroom in the Manor. His face still shone unnaturally around the silver eye, but the scars were gone except for some faint, thin lines that Draco thought would also fade in time. He stroked them with an admiring finger, watching as Harry's darker arm looped around his waist and Harry's darker head came to rest on his shoulder.

"I like the way you look all the time," Harry said, and nuzzled his face into Draco's shoulder.

"You have a month to prove that," Draco said, and rolled him over. Harry went with him, laughing, and grinned up at him from the pillow.

"Less than a month, technically, since this is the second day of our holiday," he said.

"Excuses, excuses," Draco said, and lowered his head to nip at Harry's clavicle, well-pleased with himself and the world for the choices he had made.

* * *

Harry reached up and locked his hands together in Draco's hair, forcing him to mouth more strongly. Pleasure raced through his body, and he rolled on his side so that he could bring his own mouth into alignment and give Draco half the pleasure he gave Harry. From the way Draco started and all-but-leaped when Harry bit his arm, Harry thought he was succeeding.

Nearly a month off from Auror training. And then back to it.

It could never be the same as it would have been without Nihil and the war, but then again, without Nihil and the war, Harry wouldn't have Draco or the comitatus.

For a moment-as he had done often lately-he entertained a fleeing vision of Draco becoming better friends with Ron and Hermione and the Aurors such as Robards and Holder allowing the comitatus to work together in the way that only partners were ordinarily allowed to do...

Draco gasped, trembling, and Harry smiled and closed his teeth down. Whatever the future held, this moment was enough for him.

**The End.**


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